


Eddie Kaspbrak Beats the Devil

by Canneberge



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (explained in notes), (not too much though), ... technically, Canon Compliant, Combination of book and movie canon, F/M, Fix-It, Flashbacks, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Platonic Bevchie, but i have access to the stephen king wiki, i guess thats a rom com, i was way too thrilled to be able to add the mike tag and have it be true lmfao, mostly Eddie POV, mostly to senior year because i literally have no idea what 13 year olds act like lmao, so i found some deities that could, starts off kinda angsty and becomes smth somewhere between fluff and a comedy, the turtle can't help us, tw: exposition, which
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23533030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canneberge/pseuds/Canneberge
Summary: And the voice (the Voice, maybe, but capital-V Voices still meant something else to Eddie, even now, even here, wherever here was) said: "Alright, kid, I’m getting impatient. Make your choice. I got things to do, and you’re very small."You’re so small,Eddie thought, not in his own voice.And cute-cute-cute! Someone’s gotta remind you, Eds!Another voice, also not his own, a girl’s, chimed in:Beep-beep, Trashmouth. Leave him alone. Look, he’s all red.A third voice:He’s red because you people don’t wear sunscreen. I told you it was a bad idea to come down here without it.It was several voices, all together, that yelledshut up, Stan!in response.Eddie, unable to sigh, felt the spirit of a sigh."They’re not going to be okay without me, are they?" he asked. "I guess I’d better go back then."--(Or: After the Losers defeat It, they find they're having trouble moving on. Most notably Eddie, who just wanted to die in peace, and literallycannot move on. "Unfinished business" is such bullshit.)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Mike Hanlon/Love and happiness
Comments: 36
Kudos: 41





	1. i latch onto one insignificant quote as proof that eddie could come back to life

**Author's Note:**

> *****Some necessary clarifications:**
> 
> This is going to be mostly adhering to book canon, which essentially just means that some side characters have slightly different roles (like Mr. Keene). The only things I'm really borrowing from the movie are that it's set in 1989/2016 instead of 1958 and that they're 13 in That summer, plus a couple of character details that I liked. First couple chapters are short & mostly setup. Apologies in advance.
> 
> and as always please talk to me in the comments!! i need interaction during quarantine lmao xo
> 
> talk to me baby talk to me!! @cranberryofficial on t*mblr

_ 2016 _

The Turtle was not only unable to help the Losers Club of 1989, it was dead. While It had been a master of trickery and deceit, a shape-shifting liar from the fourth dimension, It had not lied about this. Why would it? Things were playing out exactly as It had hoped. Better than it could have hoped, even if it was capable of such a feeling, which it was not. It felt hunger, and fear, and now pain.

It did not like this third feeling, but this was the one which overwhelmed It as its not-quite-hope died along with it.

And now It was gone along with the Turtle. Its eggs had been crushed by the fatboy. It could feel them dying, another, deeper, stranger sort of pain, twisting. In another creature, this might have been maternal instinct, perhaps even motherly love. But It had felt only that it was losing. And then it had lost. And then it was over. The magic was gone. The Losers were forgetting. Their lucky seven had been reduced to five, and one by one, they would peel off, just as they had twenty-seven years ago. The memories of the fallen, all that remained of their lives, would fade.

But you know what they say.

No one who dies in Derry ever  _ really  _ dies.

_ On the road/3:47 p.m. _

Beverly Marsh needed to pee. Badly. But there was something pressing on her mind, and this pressure was stronger than the one on her bladder, if only barely. If she spoke, she would lose it. She didn’t know how she knew this. She just did, the same way she knew how to sew a dress or fire a slingshot. It was a memory, she thought, but didn’t memories generally have an image or a voice or a story to make them up? This was nothing. It was the memory of a memory. It was something forgotten, a string around her finger that she was staring at, trying to recall why she’d tied it.

Her eyes drifted to her actual fingers, those of her left hand. They were laced into the much larger hand of the man driving.

Her ring finger was bare.

She smiled to herself.

The memory pressed.  _ What was it? A boy-- he was standing in a lake. It was nighttime. No-- there were no stars. They were indoors. Underground? _

She sighed in defeat. The memory, whatever it was, was gone.

“You okay?” The driver asked, genuine concern on his face. He squeezed her hand.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, of course. I just have to use the bathroom. Can we pull over?”

“There’s a rest stop up ahead,” he said, inclining his head in the direction of a road sign printed with the words FREE COFFEE - VOLUNTEER PROGRAM - BATHROOMS.

“Thank God,” she groaned, and he laughed. 

“Why didn’t you say something sooner? We could have stopped at the McDonald’s back there.” His tone was light, teasing. Always so, so kind. So patient. She decided to be honest. It was a new feeling, and it overwhelmed her a little, but it wasn’t entirely disagreeable.

She scrunched her face up, squinting. “I was trying to remember something.”

His face fell. “Thinking about them?”

Desperation filled her, suddenly, and she twisted in her seat to look at his face, drinking in the line of his jaw and the softness of his eyes.  _ What if she forgot Ben?  _ “I-- I’m trying to, but I can’t-- I keep--” He nodded as if this made sense, and she was able to choke out, “It’s like-- they’re right  _ there--  _ they’re always on my mind, but when I try to  _ think  _ about them it just--” before tears overtook her voice. She laughed at herself, withdrawing her hand to wipe at her face with both sleeves. 

“Hey. Bev. Don’t beat yourself up,” he said. “It’s not your fault. It’s the… the town. It’s… easy to forget.” His handsome face wrinkled in discomfort, as if he knew that wasn’t right. 

“No,” she said, unthinking. A tremor ran down her spine at her own pronouncement. Fear.  _ Terror.  _ Of what? Disagreeing, she decided. Even with Ben, sweet, gentle Ben, disagreeing still made her (worry) (worry a  _ lot)  _ panic.

That was it. Nothing more.

Nothing less.

“You’re right,” she conceded. “Something about the town.” Adding that qualifier somehow felt better. It  _ was  _ something about the town. Something under it.

_ It wasn’t nighttime; her second guess was right. He’d been standing in the sewer, looking down at her, somehow approachable despite his stature. He was like a king, she thought. She’d read the phrase “benevolent ruler” in a book last week, and it had made her think of Bill.  _

Bill! How had she forgotten him? She’d-- well, now she might say she was too young, at the time, for that to have been true, but she had, all the same-- yes, she’d loved him. And she’d forgotten about him, completely and utterly. 

The whole time they’d been--  _ what? What had they done?--  _ together, that past week, she’d kept saying it. To all of them.  _ I love you. I love you.  _ They’d said it, too. To her; to each other. It was the only reason they’d won, she thought, but a fat lot of good  _ love  _ was doing her now, forgetting them all. And why was the word  _ won  _ at the front of her mind? What had they been  _ fighting?  _ W ho were _ they?  _

When she made it to the rest stop, she locked herself in the stall and screamed through her teeth until some of the frustration left her body.

By the time she was back in the car, they were gone. It would be almost a year before she remembered them: Bill and Mike and Eddie

_???/??? _

was standing on something, but he could not, for the life of him, figure out what it was. It felt perfectly hard and smooth, like the shell of a candy, but at the same time it did not seem to be solid-- that was, it didn't seem to be exerting any pressure on the soles of his feet. Perhaps, he thought, it was him that was not applying any pressure to  _ it,  _ rather than the other way around. Or maybe there was just no gravity at all, where he was. He craned his neck down, trying to see beneath his feet, but no matter how he twisted, he could not seem to look below himself. It occurred to him that he might not have a neck at all, and if that was the case, he might not have feet, either. Around him was perfect darkness. He could neither prove nor disprove this theory without a light.

_ I would like a light, please,  _ he thought plainly. He thought he felt something laugh. It was not unkind, nor did it seem particularly friendly. He was reminded, bizarrely, of Norbert Keene, the owner of the Central Street Drug Store back in Derry. A truly neutral force, and yet one who held so much power over him. When Mr. Keene had taken him into the back room and told him that Eddie’s asthma was inside his head, Eddie had been so scared it didn’t matter if his asthma was in his head or his lungs or his asshole; he’d thought he was going to die. 

Now, he was not scared. His throat was not constricting because he didn’t have one.

— _ A light, huh?  _ The voice chortled. It was so low. Eddie must have had a body of some sort, because he felt the voice rumbling through every part of it.

_ Yes, please. _

— _ And where would you like that light? _

_ I’m sorry?  _ he asked politely.

— _ You have two options, son. Choose wisely. Not a lot of people get that many. But that Turtle left an awful lot of flimsy patches when he made this world. You had the bad luck to be born in one of them. _

_ Flimsy patches? _

— _ You ever think about quickmud anymore?  _

_ Not since I was a kid,  _ Eddie said.  _ We used to worry about it in the Barrens. I always thought it would be a bigger problem than it ended up being.  _

— _ It’s a problem now, kid. _

Eddie looked around again. His whole self seemed to roll in the space. There was still nothing, but at one end of the nothing, there was a pinprick of white light, so pure it burned. On the opposite end, the side he'd come from, he thought, there was another prick. This one was dimmer, almost gray. Something, or somethings, seemed to be moving behind it.

He looked back to the white.

_ I made it?  _ Almost as soon as the thought escaped him, he was ashamed at its plaintive sound.

— _ There were a lot of things you worried about as a kid that ended up not mattering.  _ The voice sounded almost amused.  _ Even if quickmud wasn’t one of them.  _

Eddie tried very hard not to think anything.

— _ Yeah, you were good enough. Not that it works like that anyway. _

Again: Shame.

— _ Alright, kid, I’m getting impatient. Make your choice. I got things to do, and you’re very small. _

_ You’re so small,  _ Eddie thought, this time to himself, and not in his own voice.  _ And cute-cute- _ cute!  _ Someone’s gotta remind you, Eds!  _ Another voice, also not his own, a girl’s, chimed in:  _ Beep-beep, Trashmouth. Leave him alone. Look, he’s all red.  _ A third voice:  _ He’s red because you people don’t wear sunscreen. I  _ told  _ you it was a bad idea to come down here without it.  _ It was several voices, all together, that yelled  _ shut up, Stan!  _ in response to this.

Eddie felt the spirit of a sigh. 

_ They’re not going to be okay without me, are they?  _ he asked.

— _ The universe isn’t even gonna blink, kid. “Okay” don’t mean nothin’. _

He waited.

— _ But, no. They probably won’t be. _

_ I guess I’d better go back then,  _ he said.

— _ You Losers. More trouble than you’re worth. I don’t know how Maturin cared about you for so long. _

This was the last thing he heard.


	2. richies pov lets get it i can say fuck now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> richie is a dj at a radio station in the book and i like that better because he gets to use his voices so he’s a dj here. 
> 
> kat avery will not be mentioned again rest easy
> 
> also tw for the rest of this fic for pretty much anything that was in the book/movies (violence slurs etc)  
> im not gonna say the n word though stephen king said the n word hella n im just not comfortable w that anyway peace
> 
> @cranberryofficial on tumblr!! come talk to me

“Rich, you can’t just excuse yourself from life,” Steve said through the phone. Steve Covall was the program director for KLAD, the station at which Richie deejayed. What this meant, in practice, was that he held Richie’s career in his hands like a delicate glass statue. Richie had told him to fuck off three times in the past few days, two times in a slightly politer manner, once just like that: fuck off, Steve.

For a man with so much hold over Richie’s future, he sounded awfully tinny and inconsequential through the phone’s speaker.

“My best friend died, man. I need the week off,” Richie said, not for the first time, scrubbing his hand across his face. He was lying on the couch in his living room, his back to the cushions. The couch was suede. Richie had learned two things about suede in the past week: One, it became less comfortable when you had the side of your face pressed into it for six hours without moving; two, it was hard to get cocaine out of.

Richie wondered if he had any more coke. He was pretty sure the answer was no. He didn’t have a whole lot of memories of the past week or so (the past two weeks, really, but talking about the time since he’d come back to his apartment) and he thought some of that might have to do with the quantity of cocaine he’d consumed immediately after returning. 

He had some vodka, he thought. It was in the liquor cabinet by the kitchen, which meant he’d have to get off the couch to get it, though, and that seemed like an awful lot of work for a headache.

“... name again?” Steve was saying.

“I already told you, man, his name was Stan. Stanley…” Richie paused. He couldn’t remember Stan’s last name. Actually, he couldn’t remember  _ Stan.  _ The only reason he’d said the name was because he was pretty sure he’d said it to Steve a couple days ago, when he’d had to explain away his fucking off to Maine for half a week, and because he had a vague memory of 

(the Spider-- a woman, her hair red, her face pale-- blood-- in Richie’s lap, his arm destroyed, whispering something important-- a statue-- falling)

someone telling him that Stan had committed suicide.  _ Maybe there was something in the water in Derry, fucked people up,  _ Richie thought, deciding to get the vodka. He swung his legs to the floor and picked himself up off the couch.

“Rich,” Steve said again. “If you don’t come in for the six-o-clock tonight, I’m gonna have to let you go. I get that you’re hurting, and I’m sorry, really I am. But I can’t keep covering your ass, man.”

“‘S’okay,” Richie said, vodka now in hand, balancing the phone between his ear and shoulder as he attempted to unscrew the lid. It popped off, slipped out of his hand, and rolled away. He watched it go for a moment. He still wasn’t used to the way things looked through his glasses. Smaller than they had through his contacts, somehow, like they were farther away from where he was. But he’d come back from Derry with his glasses on and his contacts lost, and because he was a jackass who forgot to order new ones from Costco before he ran out, he was stuck being four-eyes until the shipment came in.

He considered saying something more to Steve and instead hung up the phone. Wasn’t like a polite goodbye was going to save his job. 

He took a slug out of the bottle. His phone said it was 5:31 p.m.

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself. He hit the redial button.

“What the hell do you want, Rich,” Steve asked. Richie wished his drink was as cold as Steve’s voice.

“I’ll be there at six,” Richie said.

“You’ll be here at five forty-five, and you’ll stay on script,” Steve replied.

Richie didn’t stay on script. (In his defense, by the time he was on the air, he was starting to feel the vodka he’d pounded on the way over.) He could feel Steve’s glare on the side of his face as he yammered into the microphone. If he wasn’t so wonderfully numb, he thought he might be actually be able to feel his manager’s glowering burning a hole into his head. But he was, and Steve could do nothing to stop him, short of marching into the booth and cutting Richie off by force. Hell, Richie wasn’t even sure  _ Richie  _ could do anything to stop  _ himself.  _ He just kept talking. “They don’t call me Trashmouth for nothing,” he said into the mic, not knowing who called him Trashmouth. The other person in the room just outside the recording studio, a woman with too-short blonde bangs, was laughing. He was pretty sure she was another deejay, or maybe an intern. Well, if she was laughing, he must be saying something funny; he just hoped it sounded more coherent to the listeners than it did to his own ears. “No, sir, they don’t call me

_ August 1993 _

when you get home, okay?”

“Jesus, Eds, will you cool your shit? I’m not gonna die walking down Witcham Street,” Richie said, pinching the front of his tee-shirt away from his chest and flapping it in a futile attempt to get a breeze underneath the thing. “Why is it so fuckin’  _ hot?” _

“Because it’s August?”

“Oh, look at me, I’m Eddie Kaspbrak, I know the months,” Richie said, pulling a face. They were sitting in the woods in the general vicinity of the clubhouse, because the three of them-- Richie, Stan, and Eddie-- had gotten the bright idea to try and find it again, but Eddie’s internal compass had failed them. Richie and Stan had finally begged off searching in favor of lunch and birdwatching, respectively. This had pretty much become the formula for summer afternoons: Richie would get bored of entertaining himself (usually with the help of Farrah Fawcett or similar, in the form of one of the magazines stuffed into his mattress). He’d call someone, usually Stan. That person would sometimes call someone else, and then they’d all hang out in a group of two or three and talk about the five that weren’t there.

They were never all together. It wasn’t like they didn’t miss each other like crazy; at least, he missed all of them. Bill and Ben especially, ever since they’d moved away. Maybe they didn’t miss him? Oh, God, were they all hanging out without him? No, that was stupid. And Stan would never. And Ben lived in, like, Oklahoma or some shit, so that wasn’t even possible. Richie chided himself for being such a girl.

Eddie was saying, “...and I’m serious. Just because Henry Bowers isn’t-- bad stuff can’t still happen, is what I’m saying. I heard about this one girl, you know Cissy Clark? She--”

“Spaghetti man, you  _ do  _ care about me!” Richie cried, cutting off a story about Cissy Clark that he did, in fact, know, because he had heard from Eddie himself. Three times. He stood up from the log they were sitting on, brushing lichen off the seat of his shorts. “But I  _ promise  _ you I will make it home uneaten and un-raped.”

“You can’t  _ know  _ that--” Eddie scrambled to his feet to walk after him. Richie was gratified to notice that Eddie had to maintain something close to a jog, because he-- Richie-- had grown about a foot in the past year and was now actually  _ tall.  _ ’Bout fucking time he beat Bill at something. (Eddie, for his part, was skirting the wrong side of five-seven.)

“You know how I  _ will  _ die, though?” Richie said, turning with wide eyes.

“I don’t think I want to,” Eddie said flatly.

“I will be killed,  _ boy, killed ah say,  _ by your mother if she picks up before you do. That woman has had it out for me ever since I refused to strap on the inflatable--”

“Nope,” Eddie said, holding up one hand. “Nope, nope, not going there. Stan said he’d call me when  _ he  _ left.”

“Stan’s a better friend than I am.”

Eddie looked as if he very much wanted to disagree, just to disagree, but he could not, of course, counter this point without undermining approximately three-quarters of the statements he’d made in the past twelve years.

“Well, call Stan and have him call me for you--”

“Are you okay, man? Like actually?” Richie asked. “I mean I’m sincere. You seem a little worked up, my boy.” (He threw on a Pompous Professor Voice for this last part, not wanting to be  _ too  _ sincere.)

“I just…” Eddie trailed off, kicking at the ground. They were nearing the Kissing Bridge, and Richie could feel himself beginning to tense up. Curse his stupid, horny, deeply mistaken thirteen-year-old self. Someday he was going to be able to walk past that fucking  _ R+E  _ without feeling like he needed to cause some big scene so that whoever he was with didn’t see it. There were hundreds of initials carved into the bridge. He knew that. Dozens of them were probably R’s and twice that were probably E’s and no one would be any the wiser even if they  _ did  _ see it, but… maybe he could come back here again and scratch it out? Someone might see him, though. Like Eds had said: just because Henry Bowers was in jail or whatever didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of people left in Derry who’d be happy to deck a faggot one. Or worse, Bev or someone could stumble upon him, and they’d  _ definitely  _ know what the E stood for. God, or Kat Avery from English class. She was, Richie had decided, extremely cute, and he’d talked to Stan about this until he’d threatened to kill him, at which point he’d switched to talking to Bill about it on the phone. Bill always sounded kind of confused when he called, and Richie reminded himself that Bill wasn’t fucking  _ forgetting  _ him; that was ridiculous, he was just busy. Really busy. He could talk to Eddie about her, he supposed, but that felt out of line, for some reason. ( _ R+E,  _ the bridge reminded him as they walked by.) 

Maybe he could burn it down? That wouldn’t be too drastic. 

Eddie was saying something. Whatever it was, Richie had missed all of it. 

“Yeah,” he said, nodding wisely and hoping that this was an appropriate response, or at the very least, one that made sense. “I know what you mean.”

Eddie looked wounded. Shit.

“You better fuckin’ sit by your phone,” Richie said by way of apology. “If Sonia picks up we’re gonna be tied up for  _ ah-while.  _ Your mother is a  _ master  _ of phone sex, Eds, I tell ya. _ ”  _ And, thank God, Eddie was smiling while he rolled his eyes.

(Mrs. Kaspbrak was not the one to answer when he called, but Richie still ended up being on the phone for almost two hours. He hung up at nine p.m. and looked into the heady darkness of his backyard and tried to think about Kat Avery’s freckles and not anyone else’s.)

_ 2016 _

“And what, pray tell, the fuck was  _ that?!” _

“Steve, I’m sorry, I swear--” Richie was laughing. He couldn’t help it. When he was nervous he either laughed or ran his mouth, and he’d already done the latter for forty-five minutes on the air, so he felt he’d exhausted that option pretty well. 

“Don’t want to hear it,” Steve said, holding up a hand. “Take the fucking week off. Happy?”

“Not particularly, Stevie, two of my friends just died.”

Steve squinted at him. “Two?”

“I-- no. One. But he… someone else…”

“Are you  _ high  _ right now?!”

Richie held his thumb and forefinger a space apart to indicate  _ a little  _ and made an apologetic face. “Sorry, Steve-o. Wasn’t planning on making an appearance tonight.”

“Well, you’re goddamn lucky you did,” Steve said, looking like he was taking a particularly painful shit. “That chick in the sound booth with me was a scout. Wants to cast you in something. Maybe stand-up.”

“No  _ shit?!” _

“Do I  _ look  _ like I want to stoke your ego right now?”

“You look like you want to give me something and then pull it out from under me, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” Richie said.

“Yeah, well, one to two of your friends just died, so I’m cutting you some slack,” Steve grumbled. “Get yourself a fuckin’ cup of coffee and meet me in my office in five so she can talk to you. I’m not telling her to come back later. You don’t deserve it.”

Pouring his cup of coffee out of the station carafe, Richie didn’t feel like he deserved much of anything. People who lied about their friends dying so they could skip off work for a week and go on a bender were a new type of shitty. He almost found it hard to believe it was something he’d done, but hell, he’d done a lot of shitty things in the past year, and he didn’t remember most of them, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapters gonna get longer also more plot/forward motion (?) after this i PROMISE  
> # of chapter estimate is.. hesitant?
> 
> shoutout to the glitch putting the notes from chapter 1 here too
> 
> lmk if you see any typos because i am editing this myself bc im far too ashamed to admit to anyone that im producing Fan Content


	3. henry bowers 2: electric boogaloo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> plot actually gonna pick up now bc eddies back esketit  
> ch 4 by far my favorite chapter so far so hopefully i will be done editing it SOON
> 
> also if you havent read the book richie yells “FUCK YOU BITCH” at the clown not bev, the way i summed that scene in this chapter made that less clear than id have liked

_ Underneath Derry/Morning _

Eddie woke up in the sewer. He was lying on the ground. His body was, at least. His head was in someone’s lap.  _ Richie,  _ he thought, and then,  _ I need to tell him, I never finished because I couldn’t  _ breathe  _ and I have to tell him now.  _ But it wasn’t Richie; he could tell by the shape of the hand in his hair, the pitch of the tears he couldn’t feel falling onto his face from above.  _ Bev.  _ Well, he had plenty of things to tell her, too.

“Bev,” he said experimentally. She didn’t react. “Can you hear me?” She could not. Either that or she was Getting Off an Awfully Good One for a time like this. Eddie tried to sit up and pitched alarmingly. His right arm was gone, chopped off at the shoulder. A wave of sick dizziness flowed through him, and he pressed his face between his knees, wrapping his other arm around the back of his head. Hadn’t it been broken? It wasn’t anymore.  _ How d’you figure that? Why not give me the other one back if you’re gonna heal this one, you fuckin’ not-turtle? _

The not-turtle didn’t bother to respond. 

Beverly was standing up now, placing his ruined body gently on the ground. She turned his face with extreme care, making sure it didn’t touch the greasy wetness of the cavern’s floor. Eddie, the real Eddie, peeled out of his body and backpedaled to avoid colliding with Bev (or, worse, finding that Bev could simply pass through him) as she unfolded herself from the ground. 

“What about Eddie?” She was saying. “We have to take him out.” 

It looked to Eddie like they had enough people to carry already-- Richie was barely standing and Bill had a redheaded woman, his wife, Eddie supposed, in his arms. Bill seemed to share this sentiment.

“We  _ gotta  _ get him out of here, man,” Richie was saying. “Come on, Ben.” Ben looked reluctant, but grabbed Eddie’s ankles to help Richie lift Eddie’s body. This was weird, too weird. Eddie was almost glad when Beverly pressed a hand to Richie’s arm a few paces later, outside the little door to Its lair, and whispered to him that they had to leave Eddie behind. 

“It’s too dark,” Richie was protesting, weeping, really, and it felt too raw, too personal, even though Eddie knew they were talking about him. He floated ahead, down the tunnel, not wanting to hear this. He could feel tears flowing down his own cheeks, but they felt cold, and they didn’t taste like salt. They didn’t taste like anything.

_ “Fuck you, bitch!”  _ He heard Richie’s voice yell from a dozen yards back, and he felt somehow avenged.

The feeling faded fast as Eddie floated behind the group, watching them laugh and jostle each other as they made their way into the Town House not twenty minutes later.

“Now could we see if they’ve got such a thing as breakfast in this place?” Ben was saying, and Richie was putting on a Voice to respond.

“Hey, fucker, wanna mourn my death a little longer before you start pulling that shit?” Eddie asked, and to his very great shock, Beverly seemed to do a double take as she walked past her reflection in the door, glancing over her shoulder to look right at him. “Bev! Bevvie! Can you  _ see  _ me?” He asked, flapping his arms, but she was already walking through, calling to the others-- nothing close to  _ hey, I just saw the ghost of our dead friend,  _ unfortunately, just something about French toast. Eddie sank back on his heels a couple inches above the ground.

Well, shit. 

This was gonna get old real 

_ 1993 _

bright idea, shithead!” Eddie yelled at Richie as they ran. “You know I think there might be something really wrong with you? Like, clinically wrong?” They were fleeing from a couple of Henry Bowers-lookalikes Eddie didn’t know the names of. He didn’t really need to know their names; he knew that they were twice his size, probably armed, and mad as a shaken beehive because Richie had taken it upon himself to play savior, and that was more than enough. That had always kind of been Richie’s thing, the whole white-knight shtick. He usually only pulled out the shining armor for Eddie and Bev (although in Richie’s case it was more like a clown suit-- a phrase that sent an inexplicable shiver down Eddie’s spine-- than one of armor). Ben had been on the receiving end of Rich’s “heroics” a time or two as well. A rescue from Richie generally took the form of him doing something worse than whatever you’d done to piss off whoever you’d pissed off, so that they’d fuck up Richie’s face instead of yours. This was not always effective, and generally resulted in both the original victim  _ and  _ Richie getting their faces twice as fucked up as would have happened if Richie had kept his fat mouth shut. All the same, Eddie appreciated the sentiment.

Or, he did when he wasn’t in the process of getting mega-fucked because of it.

“Do you have a death wish?!” He wheezed now, surprised to find that aside from the usual shortness of breath that came with an impromptu 5000-yard dash (he was pretty sure it was the normal amount, anyway) he wasn’t having any trouble breathing.

“You know I-- get that-- a lot,” Richie panted, grabbing Eddie by the arm and pulling him towards the side of Kansas Street that eventually gave way to the Barrens. “But really I just-- like living-- on the edge.”

“Oh, is that what this is?” Eddie sniped. “You coulda fooled me.”

“WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING, FAGGOT BOY?” Henry Bowers 2.0 yelled from a couple dozen paces behind them.

“Shit,” Richie hissed, and Eddie didn’t miss the way he dropped his arm; almost flung it, really. “You trust me?”

“No.”

“Foll-- wow, wait, fuck you.”

“We are currently being--  _ chased--  _ because of you.”

“YOU FAIRIES GIVE UP NOW AND I MIGHT LET YOU OFF EASY!”

“He,” Richie said, with disgust, “has  _ no  _ idea what we’ve gone up against.”

Eddie had no idea either, but he somehow shared this opinion. He wasn’t particularly scared of this stringy, acne-ridden dropout at all, really. 

That didn’t mean he was keen on getting his nose busted, though.

“Okay, you’re gonna trust me,” Richie decided, grabbing his arm again and plunging off the road and into the brush.

“Jesus-- FUCK--” Eddie turned his face in a futile attempt to avoid the twigs now whipping into it.

“I remembered where the clubhouse is!” 

“HOW?! No way, man, let’s just go back into town--”

“No, I’m serious, I don’t know, thinking about it last week just like… sparked a memory, or something-- But we have to get there without that shithead seeing us--” Richie said, putting on speed. 

Eddie stumbled, mentally cursing his mother’s genes. (He refused to believe that it was his father who’d had made him short.) They ran in silence for a moment, both listening for a sign of the Bowers wannabe behind them, Richie occasionally making a turn based off some landmark or another that only he was picking up on. After a minute, Eddie too began to recognize the shapes of the landscape around them. There was the massive fallen tree that Bill had climbed the roots of three summers ago, proclaiming himself king of the mountain. There was the lone rock that Stan had managed to smack his head on almost four years back, somehow missing all the spongy moss around it when he fell for some long-forgotten reason. There-- oh, God, there was the stump Eddie had monogrammed with the initials--

“Here!” Richie whispered suddenly, throwing himself to his knees to shuffle around in the leafy detritus. “Help me out, dipshit!” Eddie dropped as well, shaking off the memories clouding his vision, and began to scrabble on the ground for the door.

“Are you sure it’s--”

“Here!” Richie pulled up the trapdoor with one hand and made a V-for-victory sign with the other. “Ladies first, get in--” Not without pulling a face first, Eddie scrambled down the ladder into the darkness. It smelled like dirt, but in a somehow pleasant, gardenlike way, aided by the flower-scented candles Bev had left down there at some point. Richie thudded down next to him, pulling the door shut as he came.

“Fuck, I have to squat, the ceiling’s like ass height,” he whispered, pulling a Zippo out of his pocket and flicking it on. “Where’s the candles?” Silently, Eddie pointed them out, pivoting to make sure he got them all. There were a lot. The air began to thicken in a way that was oddly familiar. Something about the smoke...

Richie threw himself into the hammock. He was not having much success containing his entire self within its woven sides. “God, everything is so much  _ smaller  _ than I remembered it being,” he was saying.

“I heard my mom saying that last night when you were in her room,” Eddie said absently, trailing his fingers along the books they’d shelved on the wall-- well, Stan had, really. His Scout badge for woodworking had really come through when they’d started fitting out the clubhouse. Realizing that Richie had been silent for almost twelve seconds (a record), Eddie pulled his gaze from  _ The Hardy Boys: Night of the Werewolf  _ to squint at him. “Can I help you?”

“Eds,” he said, looking like a mother whose son had just learned to bike without training wheels, “I’m so proud of you. Your first

_ 2016 _

you say we should just forget it and leave him down there, now you’re saying we shouldn’t have? I was never in favor of it in the first place, if you recall!” Richie stabbed his pancakes with his fork, leaving it sticking up into the air.

“Not that _ we  _ should go get him,” Ben corrected placatingly, “But I think maybe we should call someone. He deserves a real funeral. Not…” He trailed off. The words  _ like Georgie  _ went unsaid, out of respect for Bill or because Ben had already forgotten the name of the kid brother he’d lost so many years ago. The Losers Club, sans two founding members and one Mike Hanlon and plus one catatonic wife, was seated around a table in the Town House (which did offer breakfast, although the waitress charged with their party had been less than happy to serve five people covered in muck and blood). Eddie had seated himself in the air on the side of their table that was not against the wall, in the spot where the waitress had stood to take their order. He’d found that he could sort of  _ will  _ himself to stay suspended like he was on a chair if he just believed it would work. He was trying not to think about it too much.

“I’m not letting some-- someone else go in and get him,” Richie spat, more at his pancakes than Ben.

“And-- I’m sorry, Richie-- but I don’t like the idea of sending someone down there at all,” Bill added. “It’s an unnecessary risk. I don’t want anyone else to die in this town. Especially not because of m-- us.” Richie scoffed and hunched his shoulders even higher than they had been.

Beverly, who was sitting next to him, gave his arm a gentle squeeze. “We all loved him, honey.”

“Beep-beep, Bevvie,” Richie said. He sounded alarmingly close to tears. He threw his napkin onto his plate and made to stand up. “Lemme out.”

“Rich--”

“Let me out. I just-- I just need to grab a smoke, okay?”

Beverly, exchanging a look with Ben, slid out from the table so that Richie could get past her. “You want me to come with you?”

“Nah, thanks, Marsh.” 

She smiled at him, gave his arm another squeeze, but looked uneasy. Eddie could relate. Richie did some shit when he was upset, and that was coming from someone who mainly had experiences with how he acted after parental-disagreement-type situations. He had no idea how Richie would react to losing two best friends in a week. He realized, with some surprise, that he didn’t actually know how Richie would react to  _ anything _ now; he hadn’t spoken to him in almost thirty years, aside from the past couple of days.  _ Two best friends.  _ Jesus. Rich didn’t even  _ know  _ him. Or Stan.

Didn’t feel like that, somehow, though. 

Eddie stood up and drifted between the tables to follow his high school best friend out the front door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i edit my own stuff bc im too ashamed to admit to anyone that i associate with the It fandom so please lmk if you see any errors


	4. i am no longer happy to say fuck actually i am extremely sick of the word fuck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> watched the miniseries last night and richie calls stan “his royal straightness” in it which is a fact that i feel is overlooked far too often. richie also has a gay ass mustache so we’re picking and choosing what we take from miniseries canon  
> Related: if anyone wants to discuss the mini series.. please comment i have Feelings about it

Eddie ended up following Beverly home. It seemed like the right choice, even if he couldn’t explain why. She’d seemed almost to have seen him, in the door of the restaurant; she was going to New York, since that was where Ben was, and that would put Eddie closest to his own house; she was with Ben, making their little party the most Losers-heavy of the four leaving Derry, since everyone else was splitting off to go home alone. It wasn’t right. They needed to stay together. They  _ needed  _ each other. Eddie had  _ given up death  _ to make sure they didn’t lose each other. (He was so goddamn tired that this somehow seemed like a greater sacrifice than his actually dying for them in the first place.)

There were also factors weighing against his decision to follow Bev: One, he didn’t actually know her that well, compared to the rest of them. He still loved her. She was still a top ten person in Eddie Kaspbrak World. But the fact was, Bill was his best friend, Richie was his… also best friend, and Ben and Bev had joined the group later, and he’d just never bonded with them the way he had with Mike.

Also, two: She was with Ben, and it was  _ fucking unbearable.  _ They kept making moon eyes at each other while they drove and clasping hands over the gearshift and shit in that vein. Eddie kept up a steady commentary on how sickening they were for the duration of the drive (why the hell hadn’t they taken a plane, also?!) but they, of course, could not hear him. 

All the same, it felt right to go with them. Eddie was trying to keep Mike’s go-on-instinct speil in mind. He wasn’t sure if this advice still held now that It was dead, but he figured since he was now undead, he was still operating in the realm of magic.

His hope that Bev would accidentally see him started to dwindle the moment she and Ben crossed the town line and continued falling the closer they got to New York. By their conversations, it was clear they were forgetting again. Derry. The other Losers. Him. Eddie wondered if they’d forget each other at some point and Ben would boot her to the side of the road, but that (fortunately) didn’t happen; it appeared they just thought they’d been dating since they were kids. Which made some sort of sense. At least, it did for Ben, who had been secretly in love with Beverly since the eighth grade. He wasn’t sure how Bev’s mind was figuring that one, since she had a  _ husband,  _ but it wasn’t his problem. 

His problem was getting them to see him.

The first tactic he tried was using mirrors. In the two or so horror movies he’d seen in his life, it seemed like people were always seeing ghosts behind them in the mirror and then turning around to find nothing there. It stood to logic that they might be able to see him in a mirror even if they couldn’t see him head-on. The issue was that they were in a car, which narrowed his options to the rearviews, and he didn’t want to pop into Ben’s frame of vision while he was checking his blind spot and send him straight into a passing tractor trailer. They’d pulled over at a rest stop at one point, but Ben had stayed in the car, focused on the screen of his cell phone, and Beverly had gone into the women’s bathroom. Eddie had hovered outside the door, hesitating, for so long that by the time he’d decided that the potential merits outweighed the creepiness of going into the ladies’ room, Beverly was coming back out, shaking water off her hands. After that, he’d decided to table the mirror strategy until they got back to Ben’s apartment. 

For the next few miles he sat and thought, trying to remember everything he knew about ghosts, which was pretty much nothing. He knew they existed (unless this was his own personal hell and he was just going to be stuck trying to communicate with his friends, watching them age and die, for eternity). He knew they could interact with the physical world to some level, because people’s chairs and stuff always moved on their own when they were haunted, and also those alphabet board things that ghosts could talk through existed for a reason, presumably. And he was pretty sure kids and animals could see ghosts, but he wasn’t sure on that one. He’d never seen a ghost as a kid, at least not that he could remember, and he felt safe in saying that if there were ghosts anywhere in the world, it would be Derry. On the other hand (the one that he  _ no longer fucking had,  _ but he was keeping that on the long list of Things Not to Think About), his recollections of childhood were still patchy at best.

And, anyway, none of these theories were helpful. He’d tried picking up a napkin off the floor of Ben’s backseat, with no luck, so maybe the moving-objects thing was a scam. Finally he gritted his teeth and put a hand on Bev’s shoulder to see if she could feel him. She didn’t react. Not even a shiver. It wasn’t

_ 1993 _

true what they said about me. Say about me. Just so you know,” Richie said. He was still in the hammock, but he’d picked a funnybook off the floor and was staring at its cover. 

“What?” Eddie looked up from the bin of relics he was sifting through. He’d found a working watch and a pack of M&M’s which was still sealed, and was weighing the pros and cons of eating the M&M’s. (Cons: disgusting, might get campylobacter or E. coli, complete loss of dignity. Pros: piss off his mom. Cons: she wouldn’t actually know he’d eaten them, so it would be more of a symbolic fuck-you.) (Pro: M&M’s.)

“I said, it’s not true what Bowers and whoever that kid today was and Bill sometimes and… everyone, I guess, what they say.”

“What, you mean that you’re a four-eyes shithead who thinks he’s funnier than he is?” Eddie asked, squinting at him. “Because I’m sorry, dude, but that’s definitely true. I hate to be the one to break it to you.”

“Oh, ha-ha,” Richie said, throwing the comic at him. “No. I mean that I’m-- you know, that I’m a--” He stopped, unable to say it. Which kind of stung, Eddie had to admit. Not that he was going to. Verbally, anyway. If his second-closest friend couldn’t even  _ say the word,  _ he wasn’t going to fess up to anything that would associate him with that whole… group of individuals.

“A what?” He said, because he was feeling weirdly defensive about it and he wanted to make Richie feel as uncomfortable as he did right now. 

“Like, a-- a faggot, man, I don’t know, a fucking queer,” Richie offered, his back to Eddie as he rummaged around the floor on the other side of the hammock for a funnybook to replace the one he’d thrown.

“Yeah, man, I know,” Eddie said. He did know. He had been acutely aware of this fact in the ninth grade, when he’d almost managed to convince himself otherwise, and let himself develop a stupid, unrequited crush as a result. It’d lasted almost four months. During those four months, Richie had finally passed second with a girl from their social studies class. It had been a particularly hellish portion of an overall shitty period in anyone’s life. Ninth grade just objectively sucked, whether or not you were a gay C-average student with psychosomatic asthma, but being that much of a loser, well, that just made it all the more fun.

“Good,” Richie said. Why the fuck was he even clarifying this?

“Good,” Eddie said, not really feeling it. “Any other big non-reveals? Want me to know that you have bad eyesight? Or that you really like doing shitty impressions?”

“I’ve always been kind of into doctors,” Richie offered.

“Doct-- wh--  _ doctors?  _ You mean like sexy nurse costumes or  _ doctors  _ doctors? Like the scrubs?” The weird tension of Richie’s anti-coming-out dissipated as Eddie found himself genuinely invested in this somehow horrifying revelation.

Richie shrugged, eyes wide, like,  _ wish I could tell you, man.  _ “I don’t know, just the concept of doctors, I guess. Like you know how some people are into firemen or police or whatever because of the whole authority figure and saving lives thing? I guess it’s like that,” he finished.

“That’s horrible, man. I wish you hadn’t told me that. I have to carry that to my grave, now.”

“Aww, Sketti. Always thinking of me. Keeping my darkest secrets.”

Flashing his best evil grin, Eddie said, “Oh, no, I didn’t say  _ that.  _ No, this’ll haunt me to the day I die, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna make sure it’s weighing on Stan and Bill too--”

“That’s what  _ carry it to your grave  _ MEANS, you shit--”

“Actually, I think I’ll go call Bill right now--” Eddie said, making to get up off the floor.

“D’you think he’d pick up?” Richie asked quietly, and the air changed again. He sounded hollowed-out. Eddie had always been under the impression that Rich was doing fine in Bill’s absence; he had Stan, who he’d always been closer to than anyone, and he never let onto any level of distress. That was Richie, though. It was hard to tell. (Except that wasn’t true, was it? He was the easiest to read out of all of them. His deflecting became so obvious it hurt to laugh at. But Eddie hadn’t wanted to admit there was any reason for him to be hurting over Bill, had he? Because hadn’t he wanted to believe he was imagining it? Imagining the way Bill was)

“I think he’s forgetting about us, man,” Richie said. Eddie realized, with alarm, that he sounded, if not close to tears, then at least tears-adjacent.

“Nah, dude, I’m, sure that’s not…” he trailed off. Bill definitely was. The last time Eddie had called him, about a week prior, he hadn’t even picked up. Eddie had redialed twice before Bill answered with an irritated,  _ Hello?! _

“It’s me, Big Bill,” Eddie had said to the person who had taught him how to whistle through his teeth in the fourth grade, who had made him realize (via: shoulders) some things about himself in the sixth, who had fought a murderous space clown with him in the seventh. The person who’d been a brother and a father and an idol rolled into one for as long as Eddie could remember.

And Bill had said, “I’m sorry, who is this?” with that irritation still barbed in his voice.

“Eddie Kaspbrak? Your oldest and closest friend?”

Silence.

“Your smallest friend…?” He tried.

“I’m sorry, I don’t--”

“From Derry?” Eddie wasn’t sure what made him say it, but the name worked like an incantation.

“Oh-- shit, man, I’m sorry, of course, I don’t know-- how have you been?” Bill said, like they hadn’t talked two days ago, and Eddie had his second Bill-prompted epiphany, this one somehow less pleasant than the first and unrelated to his  _ broad  _ fucking shoulders.

Something was  _ weird  _ about Derry. Like, beyond the weirdness that they were all well aware of.

He said as much to Richie now.

“What, you think the town is making him forget about us?” Richie asked. He seemed to be mulling over the idea seriously, which Eddie appreciated, from an emotional standpoint, at least. As far as he was concerned, it was a stupid idea inspired by their mutual hero-worship of someone who had inevitably made cooler friends in the  _ three fucking years _ since he’d left his shitty hometown. But he wasn’t going to voice that to Richie, who looked so goddamn hopeful that Eddie wanted to, like, pat him on the head or something. 

Eddie shrugged. “You got any better

_ 2016 _

if we just handle this over the phone, I think,” Beverly said. She was standing in front of the flat-screen in Ben’s living room. Her shoulders were hunched to her ears. One of them was holding up her cell phone; both of her hands were clenched around her forearms, nails digging into her freckled skin. Eddie, not for the first time in the three days since he’d arrived at  _ casa Hanscom,  _ felt like an invader. Not that he was going to leave her side. He wasn’t sure if the strength and positivity he was mentally sending her way were having any effect, but he’d seen enough to know that they very well might be. 

“Yes, I do,” Beverly said into the phone. She closed her eyes, her forehead wrinkling. “Yes, I understand that it will make it more difficult-- no, not the-- yes, I want my designs. I don’t care about the past profits.” She paused, listening. “Creative rights. Exactly.” She turned to the wall, straightening a little to hold the phone with one hand and rub her right eyebrow with the other. “Shi-- oh, I’m sorry, I-- alright. Thank you. I’ll be in contact.” She ended the call. For a moment she was still, gazing at a jurassic-looking plant Ben had put in his living room, in a modern-looking white… Eddie didn’t know. Pot? Vase? It looked like a giant ceramic glucose checker, which was, as far as he was concerned, a stupid shape for a flowerpot.

Beverly snapped, throwing her cell phone at the back of the couch with a scream. She threw herself onto the cushions after it, still yelling. (Ben was out for the day, at Beverly’s insistence that he return to work. Eddie privately thought that her firmness on this point may have had something to do with the need to let out some emotions without the world’s most ripped Great Dane puppy asking about her feelings.) 

“Are you okay?” Eddie asked anyway, knowing she couldn’t--

“No,” she whispered, and then her eyes snapped open. “Wh--” She sat up, looking wildly around the room. “Hello? Is someone-- hello?” She pushed herself into the corner of the couch with her feet, nostrils flaring, back pressed against the cushions.

“Bev, it’s me! Can you see me? CAN YOU HEAR ME?” Eddie yelled, half-assing a couple jumping jacks. Bev looked distrustfully around the room, eyes finally landing on her phone, half-buried in the cushions. 

“Oh,” she muttered. She rubbed a hand across her face. “God, I’m jumpy.”

“BEVERLY I AM HERE. EDDIE KASPBRAK. SHORT HYPOCHONDRIAC. KILLED A MAN WITH YOU. ALSO A GIANT ALIEN SPIDER,” Eddie yelled, climbing on top of the glass coffee table and waving his arms. Beverly didn’t respond except to chew on her thumbnail, brow furrowed. 

The front door opened, and both Eddie and Bev jumped. Eddie fell backward off the coffee table.

“Bev?” Ben called, striding into the living room with a Trader Joe’s bag in his arms. For such a hotshot architect, his house was pretty small. The front door opened into a little foyer, on the right of which was the kitchen. It was a straight shot into the living room; you could see right into it if you peered through the window inlaid in the front door from the outside. The house was small in a nice way, though; it fitted Ben and Beverly with a little extra wiggle room, and half its walls were glass, making it feel more open than it was. It didn’t feel constricting. Ben and Beverly clearly did not feel trapped by it, like they were being smothered constantly and had to lock themselves in the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet lid and thinking about the Percodan on the bottom shelf of the overstocked medicine cabinet, to feel like they weren’t having the air crushed out of their lungs by a life they weren’t meant to be living. 

Or any other hypothetical, fictional scenarios like that. 

Sprawled on his ass on Ben’s carpet, for the first time since he’d died, Eddie thought of home. (A word which brought to mind red hair, too-big bicycles, water he shouldn’t be swimming in, and laughter. Not what he was thinking of at all, right now, actually.) He thought of his house. His wife.  _ Myra.  _ Shit. He needed to… do something. He was in New York. He’d  _ come  _ to New York partially so he could go back to his own place. How could he get there? Could he travel on his own? If he went too far from one of the Losers, would he cease to exist? It seemed somehow possible.

Rather than dwell on this, he returned to Bev and Ben. They were in the kitchen, unpacking the grocery bag together. Eddie floated in to see Bev opening the right cabinet for pasta on the first try. She was already at home here.

“Are you sure?” Ben was saying. He sounded delighted. 

Beverly shrugged, looking uncharacteristically demure. “Well, I don’t know, I was… I was kind of feeling…  _ watched  _ today. I don’t know what it was. I thought it might help.”

“I know what you mean,” Ben said, folding up the brown paper sack and sticking it into a drawer. (Of course he would reuse his grocery bags.) “I’ve felt kind of… on edge ever since we got back from, uh…” he trailed off.

“Maine?” Beverly offered, sounding unsure.

“Right! Yes. Why were we…? Anyway, I think that’s a great idea.”

Bev beamed, wistfully clutching a package of frozen blueberries to her chest. “A dog! Ooh, I know it’s silly, but I’m actually kind of excited! We’re-- I don’t know, we’re growing our family!” She laughed at herself a little, and Ben smiled at her with so much love in his eyes Eddie wanted to throw something like a real poltergeist.

“Do I get a say in this addition to the family?” Eddie asked. “Because I am personally very opposed to the concept of pets.”

“Salmon sound good tonight?” Ben asked.

“Sure,” Beverly said, still smiling as she reached into the fridge for the fish.

“Oh, it’s fine,” Eddie groused. “Just ignore me. You all did when I was alive anyway.” Beverly passed Ben the salmon, and he started bustling around with it on the cutting board while Bev hooked her phone up to the bluetooth speakers in the living room. Bruce Springsteen started playing at the same second Ben yelped, almost drowning out his cry of pain and surprise.

“Ben? Honey?”

He turned to Bev, his face a stew of confusion. “My hands…” He held up his palm.

It was bleeding. Along the exact line where Stanley Uris had carved into it with clean piece of Coke bottle in 1989, it was bleeding. 

“Bev, I swear, the knife wasn’t anywhere near--” He noticed his other hand, then, which was dripping red onto the shiny floor. He looked to Bev with wide eyes. “I was  _ holding  _ it in that--”

His own expression of bewildered horror was mirrored in Bev’s face as she lifted her palms to him.

They were bleeding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to allure for having an article on communicating with ghosts for some reason
> 
> this episode was sponsored by bill’s shoulders, which also come up WEIRDLY A LOT in the book. like only twice i think but (dr doofenshmirtz voice) its weird that it happened twice


	5. i try to write content without it being 80% “eddie is short” (mostly fail)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate the name richie so much if i have to type it one more time im gonna lose my shit (apologies to people named richie)

To their credit, Bev and Ben handled the unexplainable-open-wounds thing like the champs that they were. They bandaged their hands (first sanitizing them with completely improper technique, which aggravated Eddie to no end-- particularly when it came to Ben, who had been  _ handling raw fish)  _ and sat at the dining room table, looking dazed but trying to figure out what was going on. They had no idea what was happening or why, a fact which became clear quickly, but they were soldiering on.

It was actually incredibly frustrating for Eddie, not unlike watching a game of charades from the sidelines and knowing what the actor was trying to convey while their teammate made one off-target guess after another.

“I think I’ve… cut my palm here before,” Beverly said.

“YES,” Eddie said.

“Me too,” Ben agreed. “As… as a kid, I want to say, but also… more recently?”

Bev nodded. “It’s weird, because I… it almost makes me feel… it almost brings back good… but I feel so  _ scared,”  _ she finished eloquently. Ben seemed to understand.

“But safe,” he added. “Somehow safe.”

Beverly nodded again. “Do you think we did it as a… promise?”

“YES!” Eddie shouted.

“Like to each other? A promise-ring type thing?” Ben asked.

“Right, exactly, when I moved away we must have done it to say we’d always stay true to each other,” Bev concluded.

“NO!” Eddie yelled. “Also, ew. Are you guys really that sappy?”

Fortunately, Bev seemed unsatisfied by this explanation. “But I feel like there were others.”

“Thank God,” Eddie said.

“Others? No, it was always you. I don’t remember anyone else.”

Eddie threw his hands up in despair. “OF COURSE YOU DON’T, BENJAMIN, YOU’RE CURSED. Try a little fucking harder, please. And what d’you mean ‘it was always you’?! Did you seriously never date after you left Derry? Even I--” He cut himself off, not sure where that was going. He was a  _ catch,  _ thanks. He was (cute, cute, _ cute _ ) married, for God’s sake.

“There were five,” Beverly whispered, looking through Eddie, through Ben, in a trance.

“Wow, fuck you too,” Eddie said. “Which two of us can go fuck ourselves? Me and Stan? I  _ know  _ it’s not Bill--”

“Five,” Ben said thoughtfully. “Yes. I remember-- we were standing in-- a forest?”

“A field--”

“The BARRENS, you traitorous--”

“The  _ Barrens,”  _ Bev whispered, drawing a hand to the base of her neck unconsciously. Everything she was doing seemed half-conscious. She was present, but she was also standing in 1989 in soggy size-four Keds, watching Stan slice open her hand, promising.  _ Losers stick together. _

“Oh my God,” Ben whispered. “Who--”

“Bill,” Bev said right away, almost too fast, and Eddie cringed on Ben’s behalf. He seemed unphased, however. He’d come a long way from the chubby little boy who wore pullovers in August to hide his tits. Not because he’d lost the tits, but because he’d grown past the hiding. He was sure of himself, now. Beverly loved him, and that was all he needed, because he knew it was true.

Eddie cringed again on his own behalf.

“Bill,” Ben agreed. “And-- the loud one-- it’s-- his name is right on the tip of my tongue…  _ mouth…  _ Trashmouth! Richie Trashmouth! Jesus, how could I forget that idiot?”

It was like watching a movie he’d already lived through.  _ Yep, next you’ll remember Mikey. Then you’ll remember Stan and me,  _ maybe,  _ because apparently you think there were only five of you. And then you’ll remember It,  _ Eddie thought, and then whatever passed for blood in his body chilled.

_ Would they remember him? _

He’d  _ died.  _ So had Stan. And then there were five. 

It couldn’t be a coincidence that five was the number they were remembering, could it? Did that mean--  _ was  _ this Hell? Was Eddie, right now, in the Bad Place?

Beverly was reaching for her phone. “Something’s wrong, Ben. Something’s really wrong. I don’t know what this means--” She held up one gauze-wrapped hand. “--but I know that much.”

“I think you’re right,” Ben said contemplatively. “Are you calling--” he hesitated for a long moment. “Bill? Rich? M-- Matt? Mike. Mike?”

“Mike,” she said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Bill was our leader,” Ben said. He wasn’t contradicting her decision, but it wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Beverly agreed. “But Mike-- Mike kept the light

_ 1993 _

dropped steadily as Richie pinched the wick of each candle between his fingers. He kept shooting looks over his shoulder, daring Eddie to tell him to stop before he burned himself. Eddie bit the inside of his cheek to stop the words that he knew Richie wanted him to say. 

“Ow, fuck.” Richie shook out his hand. He’d been too slow on the last candle, and Eddie had missed his chance to say  _ I told you so. _

“Can you hurry it up?” He said instead. “I gotta be home before my mom decides I’ve died of rapid-onset tuberculosis or something and calls nine-one-one.”

“Rapid-onset tuberculosis? Is that a thing?” Richie unfolded himself as much as he could and pointed to the last candle, which was directly underneath the clubhouse door. “Can you get that one?”

“No way. I’m getting out of this deathtrap. You know wood  _ decays  _ over time, right? Like you know this place coulda fallen in on our heads? We’re lucky it didn’t. I can’t believe I let you drag me in here. You can put it out on your way up.” Eddie concluded, and reached above his head to find the latch on the trapdoor. 

“What’s your damage, dude? Just put out the candle.”

_ “NO.”  _ He found, to his displeasure, that he had to step onto the bottom rung to have comfortable access to the latch. Hadn’t the clubhouse been, like, five feet deep? He remembered it being shallower than this. Had the floor sunk?  _ Was  _ it collapsing?

“I know I’ve said this before, but I really worry about you. You’re weird. You weird tiny man.” Richie crossed to the ladder and grabbed the bolt of the latch, hip-checking Eddie out of the way and managing to kick the candle with one of his overlong legs as he did. It went out. 

“FUCK,” Eddie said loudly, and shrank against the ladder, bumping into Richie, who instinctively wrapped an arm around him, locking him in like a rollercoaster seat. It was dark. It was too dark. The walls were too close. His throat was squeezing shut.

“Are you okay, man?”

“NO, I’m not fucking-- let GO of me!”

Richie obliged with impressive speed, which was somehow worse. Now the walls were spreading out, out, back, opening, and he was floating in the endless void of--

The trapdoor opened, and a square of dappled yellow-green light hit the floor of the treehouse, and the illusion was broken. Eddie hauled himself out, gasping for air. He lay on the uneven ground for a moment, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. He still couldn’t get air past his throat.

“I need my inhaler,” he gasped. 

“No you don’t.” 

He took his hands off his face to glare at Richie, who was sitting over him, looking annoyingly casual. “Yes I do. I can’t  _ breathe.” _

“What? ’Cause you’re scared of the  _ dark?” _

“I think that’s a perfectly valid fear given the things we’ve seen in the dark--” He pushed himself up to a sitting position so he could better glare at Richie. He couldn’t one-hundred-percent recall what it was that they’d seen in the dark, exactly, but that didn’t mean that the impression hadn’t stuck with him. “--and the number of times I have almost  _ died  _ in dark places, like  _ sewers--” _

Richie scrunched up his eyebrows. “One?”

“ONCE IS ENOUGH, RICHARD!”

He was laughing, the fucker. “Well, I may not be able to remember the specifics, but I’m pretty sure that you didn’t ‘almost die’ when we went into the sewers. I mean, Bowers threw some rocks at us, but you made it out with your pretty little face undamaged--”

“-- YOU CAN’T  _ SEE  _ TRAUMA IN SOMEONE’S  _ FACE --” _

“-- and so I rest my case that ‘the dark’ is a pretty dumb fear --”

“-- OH, WELL, AT LEAST I’M NOT SCARED OF  _ CLOWNS --” _

Richie grasped a hand to his Hawaiian shirt, gasping, mock-wounded. “Why, I told you that in  _ confidence!”  _ He said in a Southern Belle Voice.

“Yeah, and I don’t see anyone else here, do you?” Eddie sniped, gesturing to the Barrens around them, which were, as the name implied, barren, at least of people.

“Fortunately, no,” Richie said. Eddie’s stomach flipped. He ignored it.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? You planning on killing me and burying my body in the clubhouse or something?” He asked. His voice mostly did not crack.

Richie had turned a weird shade of red not unlike the hibiscuses on his shirt. “I meant we’re not getting chased anymore, dipshit.”

“Oh,” Eddie said, and wished the clubhouse was a little deeper so that he could throw himself down the still-open hatch and die when he hit the bottom when his voice came out sounding disappointed. 

“Also,” Richie added. (Eddie’s stomach ceased flipping and seemed to simply vanish from his abdomen, leaving a strangely hot-cold feeling in its place.) 

“Also?”

“Also, I would like you to note that you are no longer dying of an  _ alleged  _ asthma attack. Because you did not need your inhaler.” He flashed a shit-eating grin, hopping to his feet and offering a hand which Eddie ignored as he lifted himself, much less fluidly, off the grass. 

“That’s not fair-- you-- you distracted me--”

“Yeah, Eds, that was kind of the whole point; I think if you had needed it that wouldn’ta worked.”

Eddie sputtered, distracted by his own red face and swooping stomach and all that these implied, and, unable to come up with an intelligent counterpoint, settled on, “Don’t call

_ 2016 _

me again, please,” Bill’s voice said through the phone Bev had set in the center of the table. The first time they’d called him he declined the call. The second time, he’d hung up before Bev could explain why she was calling. Apparently Bev’s voice lacked the soothing, stay-on-the-line-while-I-dig-up-childhood-trauma properties that Mike’s possessed. “How did you get this number?” Bill asked tersely, and Bev jumped at the opening.

“We went to school together. In Derry.”

She waited a moment. Recognition did not strike. And then: “... Derry?” Jesus but this was boring. Mike hadn’t taken very long to start remembering, and Richie had at least flipped his shit in a funny way when they’d called him. (Although he sounded drunk, which was… concerning.) 

Eddie lip-synced Bev’s explanation for the call and then looked at his (no longer functional) wristwatch for dramatic effect and counted “three-- two-- one,” aloud, pointing a finger at the phone just as Bill yelled because--

“I’m sorry, I must have cut myself somehow. I really don’t remember you. I’m sorry.”

“Your hands?” Bev guessed. “Palms? One diagonal line across each?”

Beat.

“How did you know--”

Bev sighed. “I wish I could tell you that. But look, save my number. I have a feeling we’re going to need to talk again soon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always you are legally obligated to tell me if i've made any typos


	6. mike will get his hour (or: i decide eddie n mikey are tight because mike was robbed in all adaptations and deserves more screen time) (alternate title: my chapter titles are way too long)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ive used the word “finger” 8 times in this fic now and there is no fingering in it. i don’t know what to do with this information now that i have it. say ‘finger’ less i guess
> 
> also rip to mikes grandpa but he lives with his parents here bc i like the book canon better
> 
> ALSO also: please PLEASE comment!! even if all u have to say is "i hate ur writing style n this fic is boring. when they gonna fuck" i live to get external interaction during quarantine so please!! hit me up! xo

Two important things happened in the next week. The first thing was that the Losers started remembering each other. Not Eddie and Stan, which was frustrating (and still more hurtful than Eddie would care to admit, if he’d had anyone to admit it to). But they began to recall each other, slower than they had when they’d all gone back to Derry, steadily, skirting around the unexplainable things. The important things, though, they remembered: they loved each other and they’d made it through something because of it. They also figured out how to make a group chat to text each other, an agonizingly laborious process that really drove home the fact that they weren’t as young as they used to be. Eddie had thought that defeating Pennywise at forty years old had been hard; using smartphones turned out to be much worse.

The second important occurrence was the Hanscom-Marsh household dog adoption. Why Ben and Bev had decided to go through with getting a dog after their hands had started bleeding without visible cause, tying them to a group of friends whom they had utterly and inexplicably forgotten, was beyond Eddie. That seemed like the kind of major life event you put other major life events on pause for.

But who was he to criticize making poor life choices?

He really needed to go visit Myra.

The day that Ben brought Iris home, Bev and Eddie were sitting in companionable silence on the living room couch, thinking their thoughts. Bev had just hung up on a call with her divorce lawyer. She’d insisted that Ben go and pick up the dog from the shelter without her. When they’d first chosen the monster she’d gone with him to the kennels, but it had needed shots or something, and so it was only coming home today. Eddie had seen pictures of it. It was enormous. He already disliked it. 

Whatever Bev was dwelling on, it was clearly more pressing than the dog. It was easy to tell when Bev was ruminating, because her hand kept slipping into her back jeans pocket for a cigarette.

“Talk to me, Bevvie,” Eddie said.

To the great surprise of both parties, Bev said, “I don’t know if I should give up the company.”

“WHAT?!” Eddie yelled, flying off the couch and rocketing through the darkened screen of the television on the far wall. He picked himself out of the knotted piles of cords behind its stand and stuck his head back through the TV to chastise her. “Of course you shouldn’t give up the company! You’re the skill! You’re the brains! Ol’ What’s-his-name doesn’t have shit on you!” (He’d picked up a lot by listening to Bev’s phone calls with her lawyer and, occasionally, her husband himself. Was he proud of it? No. Was he ready to fistfight a man he’d never met? Yes. And that was just the lawyer. Bev’s husband he was ready to  _ murder.) _

Beverly opened her mouth to-- not respond, but to continue talking to herself, something she’d been getting the urge to do a lot lately, although she couldn’t say why-- when Ben opened the front door and a medium-sized brown bear came crashing into the house. Ben was laughing, trailing behind it with a leash looped through his hands. 

“Oh!” Bev jumped off the couch to greet them. “Hi, sweetie! Hi, Ben!” She dropped to her knees to scrub her hands in the fur ruffing the dog’s neck. It licked her face in return, giving little yelps of uncontainable joy.

Ben was beaming. (Eddie was getting real sick of the constant-lovestruck-happiness routine these two had going on.) “Wow, she’s already ‘sweetie’? I’ve been replaced that fast?”

Bev rose to kiss Ben on the cheek. “Hi, sweetie.”

From the living room, still sticking halfway out the flatscreen like the little girl from _The Ring,_ Eddie made a gagging noise and lolled his tongue out at them. He’d been such a good, functional adult before he died. Now he was acting like a kid again. If he ever figured out how to speak to the living, he could publish a paper on how people _really_ act when they know no one is looking: like thirteen-year-olds. Maybe that was just him, though; when they’d gone back to Derry, Mike had dropped the theory that the Losers had been stuck as mental children because of… something that Eddie didn’t remember. A flash of panic struck him-- _was he forgetting?!--_ but he could recall everything about the scene with crystal clarity, other than Mike’s words: they’d been in the library, sitting around a wooden table, the type of soft, pale-gold wood you only ever seemed to see in libraries and sometimes elementary schools. They were drinking. Bill had been sitting across from him, looking haggard in the light of the single, sputtering overhead; Richie was at his right, poking him in the ribs and making a joke about… oh. 

Right.

He’d been distracted.

Mike had definitely been onto something with the whole arrested-development permanent-teenagers thing. 

From the entryway, the dog let out a series of short, jugular barks. Eddie’s head snapped up. He didn’t trust this monster as far as he could throw it. It was seriously big and it looked like it smelled bad. Whatever ghost organs he had couldn’t process smells, but he was getting a strong fish-breath-and-dead-squirrel aura. The dog barked again, straining toward the living room. Eddie extricated himself from the television while Ben unhooked its leash.

“You sure you wanna give that thing free reign?” Eddie asked reprovingly, finishing this rhetorical question just in time for the dog to punctuate it by jumping up to lick his face. Him being incorporeal, she sailed through Eddie’s body rather than striking his shoulders with her paws and continued on her trajectory to slide along the carpet for a good couple of yards, an almost comic look of surprise on her doggy face. She leapt back to her feet to bark at Eddie, front legs pressed to the ground and tail wiggling in the air, as if to say,  _ what a good game! _

“Don’t come near me,” Eddie warned her.  _ “Grrr.  _ Bad dog.” She gave a couple more playful yelps in response. 

That answered that question, then. Animals could definitely see him. And apparently loved him.  _ Fantastic. _

“Iris, what you barking at, girly?” Ben asked, trotting over to leash her back up.

“Good choice,” Eddie said with a sniff.

“I guess we should keep Iris tied up until she’s used to the place, huh?” Ben continued. To Eddie’s disgust, he pressed his face to the dog’s and repeated the question to her in a mooshy baby voice. “What do you think, Bev?” She didn’t respond. “Bev?” Her focus was fixed on the spot where Iris had been; the spot where Eddie was 

(floating) 

standing, her eyes bleary with thought.

“Oh my God,” she said. A tingle of hope spread across Eddie’s chest, down through the fingertips of his left arm (that was, the arm he had left).  _ Please, Bev,  _ he thought, willing the words to reach the inside of her head.  _ Please. _

“Honey, are you okay?” Ben asked, his hands drifting off from Iris’s head as he regarded Bev with some worry.

“Oh my God,” she said again, her eyes still staring through Eddie. “There were seven of us. There were

_ 1993 _

only a couple of places in Derry that Eddie really felt safe. The clubhouse had been one of them, before they’d forgotten about it. The Barrens as a whole, really, despite its bugs and muck and dubious array of flora-and-fauna. Most of his friends’ houses had not. After Georgie died, Bill’s house had become a cold place; even as a young teen, he was able to pick up on the freeze that had developed between Mr. and Mrs. Denbrough. He remembered going there as a little boy-- really little, five or six years old, maybe, when Georgie was practically still a baby-- and feeling o.k. There was a sense of warmth to the family back then that had seemed foreign to him. That was before he had found the others and learned that family didn’t mean being scared to leave, it meant not wanting to. Back when he was little, he’d only ever gotten that feeling around Bill. Around the Denbrough family, really. They made him feel like he was one of them. Mrs. Denbrough made him lemonade in the summer and cocoa in the winter and never made noises about staying away from sugar, and she pinched his cheeks and said he was a growing boy, but he didn’t mind because she didn’t do it often, and anyway, it was okay when she did it, no one could fault him for letting  _ her  _ do that.

And then Georgie had died, and that had all ended. So Bill’s house was out of the question, even if Bill ever invited them over after Georgie, which he didn’t.

Stan’s house was alright, but Eddie always felt a little off-kilter there, because Stan was Jewish and all, and he wasn’t sure what he was allowed to do and what would be, like, offensive to his parents. And it always smelled weird. (He was pretty sure that was unrelated to the Jewish thing.)

Bev’s house was also out of the question.

Ben’s mom was weird. She acted like they were doing charity work by hanging out with Ben. Not in a mean way, exactly. Like, it was clear she wasn’t trying to hurt Ben’s feelings, and that she didn’t think he was a bad guy to hang around, or anything, but she was always just… a little to excited to see someone chumming with him. And she was forever pushing food on them. She wasn’t a bad cook by any means, but unlike Richie and Ben, Eddie could only manage so many helpings before he started to feel a little green and had to start passing rolls off to Richie under the table or else hiding them in his napkin. He’d gone to dinner at the Hanscoms’ twice, and that was enough for him, thanks. (Daytime visits weren’t much better. Mrs. Hanscom was equally as apt to force cake or apple slices on Eddie as she was dinner. And Ben looked just as uncomfortable about the whole situation at any hour.) And then Ben had moved to wherever, and that closed that door for good anyway.

Richie’s house was… fine. It had been fine. It had always been fine. Eddie was almost as close with Richie as he was with Bill, and now that Bill had left, he supposed he was closer with Rich than just about anyone.

But going to his house was weird now.

It wasn’t until today, in the clubhouse-- after the clubhouse, when Richie talked him down from the asthma attack in his stupid Trashmouth way-- that Eddie realized why.

And so he went to the only other place in Derry where he really felt like he was safe.

When Mike opened the door, Eddie, to his unending embarrassment, found himself breaking into tears. He had just enough time to be grateful that Mrs. Hanlon hadn’t been the one to answer his crazed knocking before Mike pulled him into a hug, no questions asked.

That was the nice thing about Mike. He liked asking questions more than just about anyone Eddie knew, but he didn’t press about personal shit. He was good to just stand there and hold your wet, salty face to his t-shirt and pat you on the back, even if he clearly felt a little weird about it.

Eddie began to feel awkward himself pretty quick, and he pulled away from the comforting farmy smell of Mike’s shirt (alfalfa hay and clean dust, an oxymoron Eddie couldn’t articulate if asked to, but one that made sense to him somehow). He scrubbed furiously across his cheekbones with one arm to erase the tears.

“Eddie?” Mike breached the silence hesitantly, and Eddie was so glad not to be called  _ Eds  _ or  _ Spaghetti  _ or, worse,  _ Eddie-bear  _ that he almost started crying again.

“Hey, Mike!” He said, trying to sound like this was a normal visit and he hadn’t just snotted all over Mike’s t-shirt. The effect was that he sounded somehow even more unhinged, verging on possessed. Mike’s face became understandably more concerned.

Eddie sighed, wiping his nose again. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” Mike said, stepping aside to let Eddie in the doorway. “My mom’s out shopping,” he added hesitantly.

Since this was clearly meant to be for Eddie’s benefit, he nodded and mumbled his thanks as he made his way toward the little farmhouse kitchen for a glass of water. He’d gotten pretty accustomed to the layout of the Hanlons’ place in the past few years. It wasn’t something he’d expected to happen, when Mike had first come crashing into their group. He’d always liked Mike fine, but until freshman year, they’d never been especially tight. Ninth grade, though, saw Ben and Bill leaving Derry, and Mike was the only one in most of Eddie’s classes-- Richie was in all AP’s for some unfathomable reason, as was Stan, and Bev’s schedule was whacked out of alignment with the rest of theirs because she had her heart set on taking home ec. at any cost. So Mike and Eddie had paired off for everything that they could, and they’d found they had plenty to talk about without the rest of the group there to fill in the conversation. Mike’s dad had a spectacularly shit pickup that Eddie came up to the farm to tinker around on as soon as he found out about it, fulfilling some of his typically unrealized car-servicing fantasies. Mike liked to sit on the grass or in the truckbed and talk to Eddie about his research and his thoughts while Eddie got his forearms satisfyingly (vengefully) grimy, and they’d made a few trips to the dump together to pick up parts, and then three years had passed, and--

Holy shit, was Mike his best friend?

“What’s on your mind?” Mike asked, not in the way of someone whose friend had just come bawling to their doorstep, but in an unpressing, penny-for-your-thoughts type of manner that Eddie appreciated. He took a sip of his water to give himself time to answer. It was cold and thin and good; well-water.

“I,” he started, and then his throat closed and he had to stop talking for a moment to try and muscle a little air through it.

“Are you okay, man?” Mike asked, making a move towards Eddie. Eddie held a hand up:  _ I’m fine. _

“Yes,” he hissed, and he reminded his asthma that Mike would not hate him, because Mike knew what it was like to have people hate him for something he couldn’t control, only _didn’t Mike go to church school and_ _maybe he thought Eddie_ could _control it and--_ “No,” Eddie wheezed. “Inhaler.” As soon as the word left his lips he hated himself even more than he had when he’d started this conversation, but through his squinted eyes he could see Mike turning on his heel to dash upstairs for the spare inhaler he knew every Loser kept on hand, even though he insisted he didn’t need it and they tried to hide the fact from him. 

It was nice to feel loved, and he reminded himself that it  _ wasn’t  _ coddling. They’d never pushed the inhalers on him. They were for emergencies, and could be accessed  _ if needed. _

Eddie tried to calm his breathing enough that it wouldn’t be needed. He could hear Mike slamming around upstairs, opening drawers and banging them shut.

_ Mike,  _ Eddie thought very clearly,  _ I am gay. I have been for as long as I can remember. It might be because my father died when I was five. I’m not sure. I did not just realize this today, but I’m starting to think it might be an issue, because I can no longer act normal around Richie. I hope you won’t think any differently of me. _

His breathing slowed enough that he could get little sips of air past his trachea. He could hear Mike coming back down the stairs.  _ You do not need the inhaler,  _ he told himself firmly.  _ Mike is not going to judge you. And if he does-- _

His airway closed again.

\--  _ and IF HE DOES, you will be fine. You will make it through you’ll have other friends Bev and Richie and-- oh God but what if he  _ told  _ Richie and-- _

“MICHAEL I AM GAY,” he said very loudly. He fixed his eyes blindly at the top of the doorframe to the hallway. Mike was frozen underneath it. He could see him, a brown blob in his periphery. Mike looked very stiff. Slowly, more scared than he’d been since (the leper) he could remember, he tracked his eyes downward to Mike’s face. Already, Mike was relaxing, arm holding the inhaler falling to his side-- he must have been holding it out, toward Eddie.

“Well,” he said, smiling gently, “I’m

_ 2016 _

glad you finally fucking decided to ACKNOWLEDGE the man who SACRIFICED HIS LIFE FOR YOU, YOU UNGRATEFUL HUSSY!”

Ben looked piqued, alerted by some sixth sense to the fact that Bev was being insulted despite the fact that he couldn’t actually hear it happening. Abashed, Eddie mumbled an apology that went equally unheard by both living, human occupants of the room. (Iris cocked her head at him.)

“Oh my God,” Bev said again, and sat down hard on the floor where she was standing. “Do you remember?”

Something about the intensity in her voice prompted Ben to lower himself to the ground beside her, staring into her pretty face with concern. “Bev, are you-- oh my God. Eddie. And-- and Stan.”

Eddie stood over them, arms akimbo. “I can’t watch this again. How long is it gonna take you people to get to the point?” 

_ There’s something you could do while you wait,  _ a little voice reminded him.  _ Somewhere you could go… some _ wife  _ you could see… _

Fuck.

He weighed his options for a moment. Sit and watch something he’d already seen happen once-- hell, something he’d already  _ lived  _ through once-- or go and… what? Try to alert his wife to his existence? Make her feel some sense of closure? Get closure himself, somehow? What good would it do to go? He’d still be gay. He’d still be dead.

“I think… I think we just saw them,” Beverly said. “Eddie, anyway. I think we went back to where we grew up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie muttered.

That was that, then. He was going to see Myra.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let eddie fw cars 2020
> 
> (“Well,” Mike said, smiling gently, “I’m glad you felt comfortable telling me. I want you to know that this doesn’t change an-- Eddie, are you okay?” Eddie was not. His throat had sealed completely and he was seeing black spots.  
> “Inhaler,” he wheezed, grasping weakly for it.  
> “Yes-- sorry-- here--” Mike stuck it directly into his mouth and patted him awkwardly while Eddie triggered it off several times in a row.)


	7. i subtweet bill

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for some reason i googled ‘how do ouija boards work’ expecting the results to explain how a ghost moves the planchette instead of saying that it’s the players subconsciously doing it. so apologies to any ghosts reading this if my explanation is inaccurate
> 
> i have now said “finger” 13 times. Unpleasant. (still no fingering and there will not be)

_ 2016 _

The house looked exactly the same as Eddie remembered it. For a brief moment he was surprised-- some part of him had expected cobwebs and crumbling walls-- and then he realized it had been less than two weeks since he’d walked out the door.

Myra, though… Myra looked different. When he’d first stuck his head into the dining room (having strolled in through the closed front door) he hadn’t recognized the woman slumped at the table.

Well, he had, but for a moment he’d thought It was back and making him see things again, because the woman sitting in Myra’s seat was his mother. And then he’d realized that, no, his deceased mother was not sitting in his dining room wearing a blonde wig, and Myra didn’t even look  _ that  _ much like her, really-- not  _ that  _ much. It was just that her face was half-covered by one hand, her chin resting in the palm, and it hid enough of her features to make her look different. That, and his perception had changed: he’d always had some level of studiously suppressed awareness about his wife’s similarities to one half of his parentage, but Richie’s constant prodding over their time in Derry had kind of… brought it to the surface.

“Myra?” He tried, voice low and gentle, the way someone with less antipathy towards dogs might talk to one hunched trembling in the corner of its kennel. She didn’t react. This was as much as he had expected; what he hadn’t expected was the feeling of guilty relief that stole over him. He wished he could sit at the table with her. The angle he had floating beside it made him feel like he was looming over her, an unpleasantly dominant stance that he’d just as soon give up to look her in the eyes. Hesitating, he reached one hand out to pat hers. She was holding a cup of coffee, just sort of looking at it. He had to twist his arm uncomfortably to touch the back of the hand around the coffee cup. As if in response to his clumsy motion towards affection, she heaved a sigh and lifted herself from the chair to--

to walk away, into the kitchen. He heard the kettle flip on a few seconds later.

Oh.

It wasn’t as if he’d thought she’d be able to see him. But with Ben, and with Bev, it had seemed like they’d been… aware. They’d sensed his energy, in some way. Their love for him had tied him to their awareness forever.

Myra loved him, right?

He felt selfish for even letting the thought cross his mind. How could he expect anything from her, when he’d -- he’d basically _lied_ to her, for their entire marriage, and-- no, there was no “basically” about it; he _had_ lied to her, he’d promised to love her in sickness and in health and he’d-- well, he had, but he’d never-- and he’d almost _cheated_ on her in Derry, and what kind of a horrible person used a middle-school reunion to cheat on his wife?

Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a middle-school reunion. 

But that wasn’t really the point.

And he’d been drunk. Very drunk. And he hadn’t  _ actually  _ taken his shirt off and kissed anyone. Or anything… like that.

Also not the point, though. He shouldn’t be standing here, in his own dining room, trying to justify  _ emotional infidelity  _ to the woman in the kitchen five feet away. (Eddie wasn’t totally clear on whether what he’d done qualified as emotional infidelity, or what constituted emotional infidelity, actually, but it seemed accurate.)

When he’d gotten the call, he’d thought about it. Leaving. Just--  _ leaving  _ leaving. Not coming back. When he’d packed, he’d done it for the long haul, telling himself that it was better to be prepared and he was just getting ready for the unknown, not getting ready to-- to walk out on his wife.

That’s what it would have been. There was no point dressing it up now. No one could hear him, where he was. No one who wasn’t already omniscient, anyway: he had no doubts that whatever had brought him back to half-life could see everything he was thinking. He was almost equally as certain that the force didn’t give two shits about what it saw inside his head.

He liked to think that if he hadn’t  _ died  _ he would’ve returned. Returned to start the divorce proceedings, yes, but come back to talk to her about it, at least.

Myra came back out of the kitchen with a new cup of tea and sat herself back at the table, a rather laborious process that made Eddie wince a little to watch. She had her cell phone with her now, and she clicked it on. 

“Siri, call Ellen,” she said.

The realization that he didn’t know who Ellen was hit him like a spider-clown tentacle to the abdomen.  _ Please, please let that be someone she just met in the last week and not someone I should know… _

“Mymy!” The woman on the other end of the call squealed. 

Shit.

“Hey, Ells!” Myra said, perky, sounding a little broken beneath the good cheer.  _ See,  _ Eddie thought petulantly,  _ I can still tell how she’s feeling. Take that,  _ Ellen.  _ You think you know Myra so well but I bet you can’t tell she’s upset.  _ I  _ can.  _ I’m  _ her husband. _

“What’s wrong, honey?” Ellen asked. 

“Oh, I’m just…” Myra trailed off. “I suppose I’m still coming to terms.”

“He’ll be back,” Ellen said confidently. “That man has no backbone. Remember the time he tried to open a garage with the chauffeur-service money? You talked him right out of it.”

_ Eddie  _ didn’t even remember that.

“But I can’t talk him out of it, can I?” Myra asked. She was beginning to get a little weepy. It seemed genuine. No one around to manipulate with it, as far as she knew. “He already left. I don’t think he’s coming back, Ellen. I really don’t.’

“Nonsense,” Ellen said. Eddie really didn’t like this lady. “Give him a week.”

“I need to file a missing persons report. He needs to come home. He  _ belongs  _ here. With me.”

“Please do not do that,” Eddie said, praying to whatever God and Turtle above might be listening that she’d at least absorb the sentiment, if not hear the words. If she filed a report he could be traced back to Derry in about fifteen minutes-- he was surprised she hadn’t already tracked his credit card to see where he’d gone off to. He’d paid cash for whatever he could while he was there, but he was sure she had a way to track his cell phone, and it was still somewhere against his hip in the sewers of Maine, cracked but likely still functional. Functional enough, at least, for his wife to locate his body. Which, in turn, would allow her to figure out where he’d been staying and who he’d been with… and if she jumped to a conclusion that would push her to press charges-- and she likely would-- then Ben and Bev and Bill and Richie and Mike… they’d all be at the mercy of a very wound-up and vengeful Myra. No, he couldn’t let her do that. Their lives had already been upturned enough by It. And what if her digging uncovered the body of Henry Bowers? Sure, it’d been Eddie who’d finally done him in, but he’d gotten into a knife fight with Mike beforehand; Mike’s blood was all over his corpse, and Mike was… well, he was one of eight Black people in Maine. Even if Its influence over Derry had really lifted, Eddie didn’t trust the local PD as far as he could throw them.

“No,” Myra sighed, before Ellen could actually respond, “You’re right. I’ll wait. I’ll give him another week.”

“Thank God,” Eddie

_ 1993 _

breathed for a moment, letting his vision clear. He still felt like he was going to pass out in the middle of Mike’s kitchen.

“I should go--” Not really seeing where he was going, he shoved himself away from the sink he’d been half-supporting himself on.

“Hey, Eddie, slow down.” Mike stopped him, even-keel as ever. “It’s okay. Really. I’m glad you told me, man.”

Eddie looked blindly up into Mike’s kind face. “I-- I’m not--” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. “Please don’t--” He stuck his inhaler in his mouth again to stop himself needing to form a coherent sentence.

“Listen. Hey, listen. It’s okay. It really is. I know it’s not up to you, man. Even if it was I wouldn't hold it against you. None of my business.” As he spoke, Mike gently guided Eddie towards the door to the backyard. 

Eddie let himself be pulled. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Mike’s general lack of surprise. It didn’t seem promising for his desire to stay comfortably in the closet. Mike was pretty perceptive, though. Even if he’d picked up on something, that didn’t mean that the other Losers had. Ben, maybe; he was such a romantic that he probably knew before Eddie did about the whole thing with--

“Bill?” Mike asked. His voice was still low and gentle, but he was Mike. He could only suppress his curiosity for so long. The redness that spread from Eddie’s neck to his ears was answer enough. 

“Understandable,” Mike said, nodding. “I mean, I can’t really see the appeal of… dick. But it’s Bill. I think we’re all a little bit in love with Bill.” While they’d been talking, he’d frog-marched Eddie out to the truck, and he let go of him now to slide Eddie’s plastic tool tray out from underneath the body of the pickup and hand it to him. Eddie’s hands flickered through the tools of their own accord, settling on a pair of pliers. He dropped to his knees and then flipped to his back, sliding himself under the truck. Last week he’d started on removing what was left of the truck’s front sway bar. It was his goal to buy a new one from Kitchener’s once he’d gotten the old one off. It had somehow rusted so completely that it was fused onto the right front drive shaft. If he didn’t come into some money soon, though, that was a pipe dream. He’d have to see if he could scrounge up a decent piece at the dump. 

He found that with his face hidden by the pickup, he was able to talk to Mike without his lungs seizing up.

“I just-- I mean, I never been into you. Not that you’re not-- but I don’t want you to think that I’m, like-- hitting on you, or anything. Because I never have. Again, not that you’re not-- you look fine,” Eddie finished lamely.

“That’s okay,” Mike said. The shadows under the truck flickered as Mike dropped to a sitting position on the grass by Eddie’s protruding hi-tops. “I’m not offended. And I wasn’t worried about it. Is there… uh, anyone?” He sounded only a little less awkward than Eddie felt.

“I need the paint scraper,” Eddie said instead of answering, twisting on his back to stick one hand out from the undercarriage for the tool. Mike handed it to him. “I think part of the sway bar might have  _ melted  _ onto the shaft. How did that even…”

“You don’t have to talk about it, man,” Mike said. He patted Eddie’s sneaker.

Eddie sighed and let his head drop onto the grass. “I dunno, man. I mean, it’s pointless. We live in fucking  _ Maine.  _ Even if I did… It’s just, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, y’know? And it’s like, yeah, people call me ‘fag’ and stuff all the time and it’s  _ fine,  _ cause my mom doesn’t take her face off the fucking television long enough to pick up on it and as long as I don’t come home with any visible bruises or anything she wouldn’t fucking notice if I came home with someone’s dick in my mouth--” He cut himself off. It wasn’t something he’d never thought about (actually,  _ it wasn’t something he thought about infrequently  _ would be a more accurate statement) but that didn’t mean Mike would be comfortable with hearing it. But Mike only gave a low chuckle in response and waited for Eddie to continue. “But someone else’s parents might notice,” he concluded.

Mike hummed, thinking. “I don’t know about that. Parents are pretty unobservant. But I can understand where you’re coming from. It might not be safe. For you either. Just because your mom doesn’t notice doesn’t mean other people might not.”

Eddie laughed sharply. “Yeah, I think ‘other people’ already do. Or haven’t you used the theater bathroom recently?”

“I don’t know how they can write stuff like that and think they can get away with it,” Mike said with fire in his voice. “And how do they think they’re any better? I mean-- they’re  _ theater kids!” _

“Ah, it doesn’t bother me too much,” Eddie lied. “Public bathrooms are hotbeds of infection anyway. You know toilet water can spray up to seven feet when you flush? And anything that’s in there too? Like particles of--” He stuttered over his words. ( _ Graywater _ , he’d almost said. But that wasn’t what he’d meant to say.) “-- of piss and shit and stuff can just, come back out and hit you in the face?”

“No shit?” Mike asked. “Urinals too?”

“I dunno about urinals. Like I said, I don’t use public bathrooms anymore ’cause I’m not trying to get giardia. Not having to read ‘Eddie Kaspbrak is a fudgepacking faggot’ while I take a pee is just a bonus.”

Mike gave another thoughtful  _ hummm.  _ “You shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

“Yeah, and there’s nothing _ you  _ shouldn’t have to deal with?” Eddie said, snorting dismissively. “Least people don’t know I’m gay just by looking at me.” Somehow, saying the words made his stomach lurch just as badly as it had the first time. His brow furrowed. “Well, maybe they do. I mean, Henry Bowers’s been calling me a faggot for years. Like, since way before I… knew. Admitted it to myself. Whatever.”

“Have you talked to anyone else about it?” Mike asked. 

“Nah. You’re the first.”

“You gonna?”

Eddie thought about it. Bev, maybe. She wouldn’t mind. She’d probably appreciate having a friend who she could be certain wasn’t secretly in love with her, but she might try to talk to him about boys, which would be… well, it would be weird. “No,” he decided. “Not yet. You cool sitting on a secret, Mikey?”

“You know it. Hey, it’s starting to get kinda dark, man. I promise I’m not trying to kick you out, but you might wanna get going if you want to beat curfew. I can call you when you get home if you want.”

Swearing, Eddie slid out from under the truck. “Nah, it’s all good, I’m sure my mom’ll want to talk at me when I get back-- but, listen-- and I wasn’t expecting to say this-- I had a good time

_ 2016 _

limit was the  _ last  _ thing Eddie needed right now.  _ One week.  _ One week to figure out how to talk to his friends, to warn them that Myra was thinking of going to the police.

_ One week.  _

He picked up his pace, floating briskly through the New York streets back to Ben’s place.  _ If he couldn’t get them to hear him in  _ one week…  _ Maybe the dog could help him.  _ A truly disgusting thought, but what were his other options? He’d tried the mirror thing as soon as he could, on Bev and Ben both. Aside from a near miss seeing Ben’s nipples (and the knowledge that Ben checked out his own abs in the mirror when he was alone, in the least narcissistic way possible) he hadn’t gained anything from it. But Iris had definitely seen him. The only problem was getting Bev and Ben to figure out what she was barking at. 

Still lost in thought, he turned down the alley behind his house, which shaved off a solid ten minutes of the walk to Ben’s. He still couldn’t wrap his head around how close they’d lived to each other. It was barely an hour’s walk between their two places. He didn’t even need to look at a map to find Ben’s apartment. Fuck, he  _ passed  _ it a couple times a month when he had someone going to Manhattan Regional.

A tugging sensation made itself known behind Eddie’s navel. He looked down in surprise, half-expecting to see a hand pulling on his button-down. There was nothing. The pulling sensation sharpened, and his body was yanked forward several feet. He yelped. Staggering to regain his balance, he glanced around. There was nothing. No clown; no leper. (There was a homeless man peeing on a dumpster. Ah, New York.) Before Eddie could recalibrate, another tug came, the hardest yet, and he was reeled forward like a fish on a line, the city streets blurring as he was pulled through them with dizzying speed.

He finally came to a blundering halt in the middle of Ben’s living room, directly between the apartment’s two occupants, who were sitting on the carpet with a brown-colored board game between them. Eddie tottered over it for a moment, but it was easier to stabilize himself this time. He looked down at the board.  _ YES - NO - GOOD BYE,  _ it read, with the letters of the alphabet spelled out between the former two and the farewell. 

A Ouija board.

“You really think  _ that’s  _ what would get him to come?” Ben was saying.

“I don’t know!” Beverly said. She sounded defensive. The graceful fingers of both her hands were braced on the slider, the tips white with anxious pressure. “I just… this is probably ridiculous. Why…” She moved to take her hands off the slider, and Eddie lurched into action, smacking it with one hand as hard as he could in a  _ here-goes-nothing  _ effort to stop her from ending what might be his only chance at communication. 

The slider (what was it called again? A plancher?) twitched hard under their hands. Bev gave a gasping little scream.

_ “Eddie?” _

_ “EDDIE?”  _ Ben said with her, loudly.

Eddie rocked back on his heels, surveying the board. He placed one hand atop Ben’s and Bev’s. Their fingers were interlocked over the…  _ planchette,  _ that was it.

Slowly, laboriously, he moved the slider to  _ YES.  _ Bev made another quiet noise of shock.

“How do we know it’s him?” Ben whispered. 

“I-- ask him something only he could know?” Bev suggested.

After a moment’s thought, Ben asked, “Eddie, what’s the worst place on earth?”

It took three full minutes (with a pause in the middle for Bev to run and grab a pen and notepad) for Eddie to spell out  _ I KNOW YOU WANT ME TO SAY 29 NEIBOLT BUT ITS DISNEYLAND - I DON’T KNOW IF YOUVE EVER BEEN THERE BUT ITS FUCKING FILTHY - GARBAGE AND CHILDREN EVERYWHERE AND THEYRE ALL RUNNING A LOW GRADE FEVER,  _ but by the time he finished, they were convinced. Bev had tracks of mascara running down her cheeks by the time he got to  _ CHILDREN EVERYWHERE.  _ She sniffled, somehow prettily, wiping the tears from her face. “I’ll go get my phone,” she whispered, her voice raw. “I think we’d better get the others to come and see this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my search history after this chapter: “parts of a car that are under the car” “what do you need to go underneath a car to work on” “car underbelly parts” “when the guy is lying on one of those scooter things from middle school gym and he’s under a car and then he dramatically rolls out what is he doing. you know what im talking about”
> 
> next chapter has STAN in it!!! is it relevant to the plot in any way?? nope! i'm very excited.
> 
> talk to meeee @cranberryofficial on tumblr


	8. STAAANNN!!!!!!!!!!!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mike: i want you to know that i love you no matter what. youre one of my closest friends and this changes nothing. it’s not something i was expecting, and itll take me some time to adjust to it, but i’m going to do my best because i care so much about you and i just want you to be happy, whoever that’s with.  
> stan: ya i know lol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my G-d i used the word finger again???? Pray for me  
> I literally never use this word in my normal writing and i havent used it sexually ONCE in this mf fic but it fucking HAUNTS me. It keeps coming back. Its like that mf from the ring. The ring finger. Holy shit. Im losing my mind
> 
> i tried something new w switching perspectives in this chapter and im…. Not sure how i feel about the results but i don’t think its a positive emotion. Let me know if it was confusing or just frustrating, either way i don’t think we will be seeing this again

_2016, a few hours earlier_

The legal pad in Bev’s hands was damp with ink, its yellow pages blackened and soggy under the weight of the words she’d scrawled across them. “Do you think that’s everything?” she asked Ben, chewing on the end of her pen. “Everything important, I mean?”

“How can we know?” Ben replied. “Unless we call--”

“We can’t call the others,” Bev said, trying not to snap. “None of them took it too well last time. Except Mike, I suppose.” He’d been just as misty as the others, but a little less surly. “And besides,” she added, “There’s no point. Eddie and Stan are dead. Disturbing the lives of three men we barely remember isn’t going to change that.”

(Oh, but how she wanted to hear their voices again.)

Ben looked thoughtful. His face wrinkled like a child’s, and for a moment Bev was so overwhelmed with fondness that she didn’t think she’d be able to speak if he asked her to.

But all he said was, “I’m going to turn the heat down. It’s getting really hot in here.” She nodded. It was. Halfway through their stilted recollection of their trip back to Derry, the air in the living room had changed-- become less charged, somehow-- and abruptly increased almost ten degrees in temperature.

Bev didn’t remember exactly what had happened in Derry, but she remembered enough that she felt she could believe almost anything.

Iris, now dozing by the coffee table, had been barking at something earlier. She’d been in a near-frenzy even after they got her quiet.

She’d stopped at almost the exact moment that the room had gone hot.

Stan was dead. Eddie was dead. But Eddie had died back home, in Derry, and

 _(no one who dies in Derry_ really _dies)_

a shiver ran down Beverly’s spine as she thought about it, because-- she didn't _remember_ how he'd died. Even after all the memories she'd gotten down-- she didn't _remember._ She studied the writing on the legal pad again. It was absurd, but…

“Ben?” She asked, before she could talk herself out of it. He wouldn’t laugh. Even if he thought it was ridiculous, he wouldn’t laugh.

“Yeah, honey?”

“I think we should try to talk to him. Eddie, I mean.” And Ben had looked at her with that same scrunched-up expression of thought, and nodded, and they’d gone out and bought a Ouija board. (Bev had felt stupid and conspicuous standing in the checkout lane at Target while the gangly young cashier rang it up with a bunch of bananas she’d tossed onto the conveyor belt just to look like she had come for something else.)

Without discussing it, they both settled on the floor of the living room, almost exactly where Bev had fallen an hour ago. She felt like a child, leaned forward on her knees with her hands on the planchette. 

“‘Place the board between two persons, lady and gentleman preferred,’” Ben read off his phone. “Oh! Well, that’s perfect! Okay. ‘Only one person should ask questions at a time…’” His lips moved silently as he skimmed the rest of the instructions. “‘Call for the spirit with his or her true name… remain respectful lest you anger the ghost…’ Okay, and it says we should make sure to sign off properly so we don’t let any evil spirits into our home.” Bev giggled, but the thought somehow didn’t strike her as funny; it seemed entirely possible. The planchette was _plastic,_ for God’s sake. The board had some with a coupon for _Barbie._ There was no way.

Ben cleared his throat uncomfortably, looking as abashed as Beverly felt, and said “Uh… Edward? Edward Kaspbrak? Are you there?”

They both stared intensely at the planchette under their fingers. It didn’t move.

“Eddie?” Bev tried. 

“It said to use his real name,” Ben pointed out. “D’you think we need to know his middle name?”

“Oh, I hope not, I have no idea what it is… I don’t know, I just thought, maybe, since we all called him Eddie, he’d have… I don’t know, more of an… emotional connection to it, or something.” She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment, thinking about it. It was true. No one who’d loved him called him Edward; even his mother had had some embarrassing pet name for him that she’d long since forgotten. They had loved him, and to them, he had never been Edward. He had been Eddie, and he had been-- “Eds?”

Ben laughed. “Oh, come on, he hated that nickname! You really think _that’s_ what would get him to come?”

“I don’t know!” Beverly snapped. “I just… this is probably ridiculous. Why…” She moved to take her hands off the slider, but before she could do so it jolted under her fingertips. She yelped. She wanted to tell Ben to stop messing (a childish phrase she hadn’t thought about, much less uttered, in years) but something beyond her deep trust for him told her that he wasn’t.

 _“Eddie?”_ She cried instead.

 _“EDDIE?”_ Ben said with her, loudly.

The planchette inched to the word _YES._ Another scream floundered and half-died in Bev’s throat.

“How do we know it’s him?” Ben whispered. 

“I-- ask him something only he could know?” she tried. She felt like she was running for the bus in an broken pair of heels. Her feet weren’t falling where they should be and every step she thought might be taking her forward made her feel more off-balance.

Ben thought for a moment, then said, “Eddie, what’s the worst place on earth?”

 _I KNOW YOU WANT ME TO SAY 29 NEIBOLT BUT ITS DISNEYLAND - I DON’T KNOW IF YOUVE EVER BEEN THERE BUT ITS FUCKING FILTHY - GARBAGE AND CHILDREN EVERYWHERE AND THEYRE ALL RUNNING A LOW GRADE FEVER,_ Eddie said. Bev laughed. Her face felt wet. “I’ll go get my phone,” she whispered, and her voice was raw. “I think we’d better get the others to come and see this.”

She could hear Ben talking behind her as she walked to the counter to grab her cell phone, but he the sound was muffled by a liquid droning in her ears. She dialed silently. Richie first. She wasn’t sure what made her so certain that this was who she should call-- Bill was their leader, Mike was their rock-- but she redialed the number and he picked up.

“Bevvie?”

The nickname blindsided her for a moment, and she couldn’t speak. “I-- it’s Beverly,” she said. “I mean-- yes, hi, it’s me. Rich, you need to come to New York.”

“Like fuck I need to come to New York,” he said cheerfully enough. 

“Do you remember Eddie?” She asked, flat-out. The energy she’d had this morning, spurred on by a good bagel and a decent cup of coffee, had drained out of her and into whatever magic they’d done to call Eddie to them. 

On the other end of the line, Richie was silent.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I remember Eddie.”

“Okay,” she said. “Good. He’s here. We need you to

_1993_

_listen_ to me, mom!” Eddie yelled, his hands tearing through his sweaty hair. “I’m _fine!_ I’m really _fine!_ I’m going to be _graduating_ in less than a year! And I’m gonna be gone! To college, or-- or-- I don’t know, to college, and what are you going to do then, mom?! What are you gonna do?! I’m gonna be halfway across the country!” His throat felt torn up from the shouting, but his voice remained steady-- _he_ wasn’t torn up at all. He was _fed_ up. He was fucking _fed up._

Sonia Kaspbrak was having none of it. “Eddie-bear! How could you _say_ that to me?! You’re staying here! You know you’re staying in Derry! We’ve talked about this!”

And they had. Or at least, she had talked at him, and he had sat there and listened because he was a good little son, and they had a deal, the deal that kept him holding his tongue and taking his pills; the deal that meant Mike could come by when he biked into town and Richie could take up too much couch space watching TV with him on Saturday mornings while Sonia did her grocery shopping.

With a strangled, wordless cry of frustration, he turned and retreated to his room, refraining from slamming the door only by reminding himself that tomorrow was Saturday and he’d really, really like to be able to spend it out.

With who, though? Mike? Richie and Stan? Everything was changing. Everyone was leaving. Wherever Eddie ended up-- Derry Community College, most likely, living at home-- the rest of them would be gone by next August. Richie would go to New York or LA or somewhere he could make it big, and he probably would. Make it big. Mike would go to Florida, maybe, for a while, but Eddie had a suspicion that he’d end up somewhere else, ultimately. Somewhere much farther away. And Stan-- well, Eddie had no idea where Stan was headed, but Stan would know, in that quietly sure manner of his. 

Everyone else was already gone.

Eddie gritted his teeth to stop himself from crying for the second time that day, with his back pressed up against his bedroom door, holding it closed. Crying over his middle school friends moving away. _Stupid. Pathetic._

He didn’t think he’d ever have friends like them again.

Everyone said that in high school. He knew everyone said that in high school. He’d heard Greta Bowie tearfully saying it to one of her senior friends when she’d graduated last year, hugging the older girl and crying makeup onto her graduation gown.

There was something more to the Losers, though. Even just the ones that were left. Something beyond the bonds of high-school classmates and a stupid, stupid, stupid high-school crush.

He groaned, pressing the heels of his hands into his more-or-less dry eyes as he slid down the door to sit on the hardwood of his bedroom floor.

Several blocks away, in the (very small) Jewish part of town, one Richard Tozier was having a similar crisis of character. His best friend, Stanley Uris, was unaffected. He patted Richie on the back. They were sitting upright on Stanley’s bed, legs dangling over the edge. Richie’s face was buried in his hands, glasses forgotten on the bed beside him.

“I-- I mean I’m not-- I really thought I was into Bevvie, man,” he said thickly.

“Probably for the best that you’re not,” Stan said, giving him another brisk little pat on the back. “I think you’d have to take a ticket.”

A wet laugh escaped Richie’s fingers. “I really thought I was into Bev,” he said again. “And-- and-- I -- girls!” He floundered.

“Girls,” Stan agreed sagely.

“You don’t hate me?” Richie asked, pulling his face out of its safe nesting spot to look at Stan through skittish eyes.

“Rich,” Stan said with his usual blunt tact, “I’ve known for a long time. I’d have to be pretty dense not to see the way you’re always flirting with Eddie.”

“I-- _EDDIE?”_ He screeched with genuine shock. “You think I’m in love with _Eddie? KASPBRAK?”_

“Well, hopefully you’re not hot for Eddie _Corcoran_ ,” Stan murmured, his mouth curling up at one edge, and then he amended, “And I didn’t say _in love._ That’s a pretty strong statement. But, yes, Eddie Kaspbrak. You know, your best friend?”

“Fuck _that,”_ Richie mumbled, going boneless and letting his body fall sideways onto Stan’s. _“You’re_ my best friend, jewboy.”

Primly, Stan replied, “Thank you.”

“Call me a fag, Stan!”

“I’m not going to call you that.”

“Jewboy and the Faggot! Saving Derry! Kicking names, taking it up the--”

“No.”

Richie sighed in theatrical disappointment. “Some best friend.”

“I’m terribly sorry that I refrain from using _slurs_ against my friends,” Stan said, extricating himself from Richie, whose initial flop had continued in glacier-slow motion until he was sprawled most of the way atop Stan’s lap with his arms out at spectacularly uncomfortable angles. “So who is it?” Stan asked as he resituated himself.

“I dunno,” Richie admitted. _“Not_ Eddie. It’s _not_ Eddie. He’s short. And I mean, he’s _cute,_ I’ve always said it, but he’s cute like a… like a puppy. Or a baby. Big-eyed baby puppy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he, like, he thinks I’m too funny. I mean, he gives me shit, yeah. But he thinks I’m really _funny_. Like right now. As I am. I need someone who’s going to push me to my greatest potential as a master of comedic vocal impressions.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t even like freckles.”

“Eddie has freckles? I hadn’t noticed.”

Richie, who had been lying sideways on the bedspread, not having bothered to lift himself when his pillow moved to the head of the bed, shot upwards with indignance.

“How! On his nose! He looks like some sort of sun-child!”

“I have no idea what that is,” Stan said, and checked his watch. He had it on good authority that there was a red-headed woodpecker in Ramsett Park, and while he loved Richie dearly, he also loved spending time on his one hobby, a hobby which had fallen almost totally by the wayside during junior year and which he was eager to kick back off with a good sighting. 

“Oh my God.”

“There we go.”

“Holy _shit.”_

“You _really_ didn’t notice?”

“It’s _Eddie!_ He’s just, like, a presence!”

“A presence?”

Richie made an inarticulate noise of anguish instead of replying and flung himself off the bed. The carpet received his weight with a dull _whumf._

“Well,” Stan said, literally brushing his hands together as if specks of the conversation were clinging to the palms, “I hope you figure it out.” He sent Richie a pointed look. Unfortunately for Stan, Richie was dumb. Not stupid, but dumb in the way that only teenaged boys deep in thoughts about their own strife can be. Stan, not dumb, withheld a sigh. His best friend needed him. 

“Do you want to come to the park with me and look at birds?”

Richie bolted back to a sitting position. Watching him was starting to make Stan dizzy. “CAN I MAKE UP NAMES FOR THEM AND YOU WON’T GET MAD??”

All Stan’s hopes of a peaceful evening died a quiet death. (He would be in stitches by the time Richie went home, and he knew it, but it was hard to keep in mind when he’d had his mind set on a different plan.) He sighed. “Yes.”

“TIT TITS!!” Richie yelled. 

Stan cringed. “Please don’t yell ‘tits’ in my house.”

“Stanley _Man_ ley! You’re a bird man! You should know I am only referencing the noble species of-- oh my God. Their real name is even better. How did I not notice that _bush tits--”_

“Whatever you’re going to say,” Stan said, crawling off the bed and grabbing his binoculars case off the back of his desk chair, “please wait until we get to the park.”

“Aye aye,” Richie saluted. “And Stan?”

 _“Yes,_ Richard?”

“I love you, man.” He sounded hesitant pushing the words out, the way Bill had sounded back when his stutter had been _really_ bad, the summer after Georgie died.

“Well,” Stan said, turning back to him, “While I can assure you that I am completely heterosexual, the feeling is mutual.”

Richie grinned. “You never know. You never know when you might have an awakening.”

“Jesus Christ,” Stan said in hushed tones, casting his eyes to the ceiling.

“I’m just sayin’. I might show up in short shorts and a fanny pack tomorrow, makin’ you imagine things.”

“Was the fanny pack part of the appeal?” Stan asked, dry as bones.

Richie smiled dreamily. “It’s all part of the appeal, Stan the 

_2016_

man looking back at Richie in the mirror was someone else. Someone Richie didn’t recognize. _When had he gotten that tired? When had he gotten that_ facial hair? He pressed on the mirror to open it, pulling his damp, rusty razor from the shelf behind. 

He looked at it for a moment, weighing the odds of visibly injuring himself if he tried to use it on his face, and then held it over the wastebasket and clicked the head off, letting it fall. It hit the mountain of tissue paper in the trash can and rolled over the edge, skittering a few inches across the slick tile floor. Richie picked it up and put it back on top of the dental floss-adorned mound.  
 _When had he last taken the trash out?_

Rummaging around under the sink for a new blade cartridge, he thought over the calls he’d gotten that afternoon. Two calls. 

One: Bev Marsh, best friend, brief childhood crush, all-around badass. Asking him to come to New York.

Two: Rachel Something-Hyphenated, the blonde from the sound booth last week. She wanted him to meet with her over lunch tomorrow, talk about His Options.

He attached the cartridge to the handle and turned on the tap to let the water warm up.

Bev needed him. Maybe he could reschedule? Rachel Whatever didn’t seem like a woman with time to spare. 

Eddie, though.

He tapped the razor against the edge of the sink, thinking. Picked up his phone. Before he could stop himself, he dialed. The phone rang twice.

He chickened out and pressed the _end call_ button.

Texting was fine. Texting was professional enough. It was 2016. He held down the home button on his phone. It chimed pleasantly.

“Text Rachel Thing (Weird Bangs),” he said to it. “Hey, sorry for the short notice, but I got a call about a family emergency. Does next week work for lunch?”

It wasn’t even a lie, exactly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the parallel between mike opening the door for eddie to cry all over him & eddie holding the door closed so his mom wouldnt see him trying not to cry was a complete accident but i feel like a super genius for noticing it. stephen king who….. he wants what i have...
> 
> leave me a comment or talk to me on tumblr (@cranberryofficial)!! i have no friends so i need all of u to talk to me instead xo
> 
> (Also: Richie gazed up at the clouds, borrowed binoculars layered over his coke-bottle glasses. The sky was very blue. It was also one-hundred percent out of focus. “Do you ever think about how ‘woodpecker’ means ‘penis penis?’” he asked. “No,” Stan said.)


	9. surprise, bitch. i bet you thought you'd seen the last of me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: i need to write satisfying lore that will make it seem plausible that eddie could come back to life & that’s consistent with stephen king’s macroverse,  
> also me: Love & Friendship are the Strongest Forces in the World and fix Everything
> 
> i feel like someone needs to get fingered now after the number of times ive brought it up. someone gets fingerbanged but its never mentioned because its not relevant to eddies journey
> 
> also.. this will *probably* be the last chapter because im.. lazy but if i my balls are ever huge enough to r*ad my old wr*ting then we shall see what happens. ok enjoy (but not too much)

_ 2016 _

Ouija board conversations were like taking the SATs all over again, twenty years after high school: slow and frustrating. After about thirty minutes of trying to communicate, even Ben looked like he wanted to throw something. On the plus side, they’d remembered everything: what they’d done, how he’d died. 

_ AND NOW I ONLY HAVE ONE ARM,  _ he said.

“You’re also  _ dead,”  _ Ben pointed out.

_ TRUE,  _ he admitted.  _ ANY UPDATE ON BILL BEV?  _ (They’d drawn a question mark on the board in Sharpie after his third flat question they’d thought was a statement.)

She had her phone in her lap and was checking it for a response every few minutes. She’d called all the Losers as soon as they’d made contact with Eddie, to mixed results. Richie had said he was coming just a few hours after she’d called yesterday, so he should be there soon. Mike had turned them down, sounding vague, citing injury as his reason for not joining them. That made sense; Bowers had fucked him up pretty badly. Eddie could’ve done without the suspiciously absent tone of voice when he said Bev’s name, though. Mike was forgetting again. He was sure of it.

As of Bev’s last check, Bill still hadn’t answered. She clicked her phone’s power button again.

“Oh-- he responded--!” She scanned the text for a moment, her face falling. “I’m sorry, Eddie. He says he can’t come. Something with his wife still being out of it… I don’t know if he believes us. His memories aren’t… I don’t think they’re coming back.”

_ THATS OK,  _ Eddie said. He hoped it was true; that it was okay. He wasn’t sure if they’d be able to do anything without the magic of all the Losers there to-- well, to what? To bring him back to life? He didn’t even know if that was possible. He was flying totally blind. 

The doorbell rang. Bev jumped. Eddie didn’t blame her; he’d almost pissed himself at the sound. This whole being-dead thing had him on edge. Also, the whole being-Eddie thing.

“I’ll get it,” Bev said, setting her phone down and padding over to the door. There was the sound of the lock turning, and then--

“Molly Ringwald!”

“Trashmouth!”

“Well, that’s over. I enjoyed my peaceful life while it lasted,” Ben said.

_ SORRY,  _ Eddie lied.

“Don’t lie to me,” Ben said.

_ THIS IS GOING TO BE FUN,  _ Eddie promised. 

“Well,  _ that’s  _ true, at least,” Ben sighed. He leaned back onto his elbows. “Remember the dam we built? That summer?” Eddie nodded, and then realized Ben couldn’t see him. Ben continued anyway. “Richie took most of the flak for it, if I remember correctly. But it was you and Bill who started it.”

“What’re you old fucks doing sitting around and reminiscing?!” Richie shouted, less coming into the room and more  _ flinging  _ himself into it. “We been doing that for the past however-many-weeks! I don’t know, I lost the timeline. I been doin’ a  _ lot  _ of--” He cut himself off, silently recalculating something. “-- sexy broads. Am I right, Bevvie?!”

“I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there,” Bev said demurely, following him in. “I was not one of the broads.”

“Missin’ out,” Richie said, shaking his head. Abruptly, he clapped his hands together, a manic smile on his face. (Which was clean-shaven. It was a different look. Not… noticeable or anything. Not drastic. Or-- anything.) 

(It looked good.)

“I been told that my main man is here in the room with us? Alive and well?”

“I wouldn’t say  _ that,  _ exactly,” Bev said, biting her lower lip. “Honey? You want to let him have a turn on the Ouija board?”

_ “Gladly,”  _ Ben said, standing up. “Are you sure you’re okay doing another round?”

She nodded. “I’m sure Eddie wants to talk to Rich. I’ll be fine. Could you make me a cup of coffee, though?” They settled around the board, and Ben excused himself to the kitchen. Eddie floated behind Richie’s broad shoulders, facing Bev.

“Okay, so how do we do this?” Richie asked, rubbing his hands together.

“Hands on the planchette,” Bev ordered. “That thing. There you go. Ben and I had to call out to him for a while, but he might already be here now…”

“You there, Eds?” Richie asked. 

A sensation of not unpleasant heat ripped through Eddie’s incorporeal form from the top of his head down. He gasped. It felt like standing in front of a plate-glass window when the sun hit it from above. Richie yelled, pulling his hands off of the Ouija board like he’d been shocked. Bev was staring at Eddie. Not through him but--  _ at  _ him.

He whispered her name, not daring to hope. At the sound-- only there shouldn’t have  _ been  _ a sound-- Richie whirled around and hollered again. “EDS!”

Eddie looked down at himself. He looked the same as he had a moment before. 

“Oh my God,” Beverly said, and sat down so abruptly that her teeth clicked together.

He looked down at himself again, holding his hand up to squint at it. “Can you…  _ see  _ me?”

Bev shook her head. The way that she did it, though, it was clear that she had seen his lips move. It was a response to his question. So she  _ could  _ see him, she just couldn’t--

“Can’t hear you, pal,” Richie said.

Eddie pointed to the Ouija board.

“Nope. No fuckin’ way. That felt like getting... electrocuted with... bees.” Richie illustrated this with a skittery hand motion apparently meant to indicate the feeling of bees crawling on and/or stinging him.

Eddie crossed his arms. Or rather, he tried to, and ended up wrapping one arm around his middle as though his stomach were cramping. “We need to--” He sighed and gave in, settling himself on the ground next to the board. The planchette felt hard in his hand, not warm, but distinctly… plastic. There was a  _ thereness _ to it that hadn’t been there before. Or maybe the change was in Eddie. He pushed the planchette across the board, feeling stupid as they all watched him. 

“Huh,” Richie said. “When this shit happened in movies I always kind of thought the ghost was...”

“Moving it with his mind?” Bev finished.

“Yeah…” 

They watched him for a moment. He stopped pushing the planchette to wave his arm at them.  _ Get this shit down!! _

“Oh-- right--” Bev grabbed the pen and pad and sat at the ready, waiting for Richie to tell her what he was saying. 

_ WE NEED TO GET THE OTHERS. _

Biting the end of the pen in thought, she nodded. “I think you might be right. Something about the…”

_ POWER OF THE SEVEN. _

“The power of the Seven,” Richie breathed.

That was when Ben entered, three steaming mugs of coffee in his hands, their handles looped around his fingers so he could bring them all out at once. His eyes were trained on the hot liquid, as if he could focus it into not spilling. It took him a moment to see Eddie. In some unspoken vestige of high-school friendship, neither Richie nor Bev said anything. The silence pulled his attention up.

By some miracle, he didn’t spill the coffee, but he did scream. “Oh my 

_ 1993 _

God, yes!” Bev squealed. “A thousand times yes!” 

“Ha ha,” Richie sniped. “If you want to ship Bill up from Portland I won’t get butthurt about it.”

She bit her lip and shook her head. Her hair, golden orange in the sunlight of the library, was almost preternaturally beautiful.  _ She  _ was, really. “No, I… too much… meaning there.”

“Whereas if you go with me, it’ll mean nothing. I see how it is.” The part of Richie that had harbored a pathetic little crush on Bev since the seventh grade was a little wounded. Fortunately, that part was not his heart (or his brain, or anything north of the waist) and he bounced back the way he always did: without much thought. “You think he’s going to ask you?”

She made a face at him. “Bill? No. He’s already tried twice. Every time he does I think it sets his mother back another two hundred dollars in speech therapy bills.”

As a certified male, one who’d been rejected by pretty girls more than his fair share, Richie cringed. “Well, to be fair, Miz Scarlett, you’re a bit of a catch.” He tipped his chair back, hooking his feet around the legs of the table so he wouldn’t fall. Study period in the library was a good idea in theory, but also, it was a terrible idea. Why couldn’t they have study period on the track or something? He could move around, and Bev could flirt with the track guy she’d been eyeing for a few weeks on the down-low, and the librarian wouldn’t come snap at them for enjoying life in the Derry High School dry-pussy zone.

Bev fluttered her eyelashes. “Oh, I know. Just be grateful you’ve managed to snag me.” 

He held his fingers up in the shape of a gun and blew imaginary smoke from the tips. “All in a day’s work for Richie Tozier, ladykiller.” 

“Ooh!” Bev clapped her hands together. “Your Hardened Explorer voice is getting really good!”

“It fucking better be, if I have to watch _ Raiders of the Lost Ark  _ one more time you’re gonna have to raid  _ my  _ tomb to take me to prom.”

“Okay, so prom.” She glanced over her shoulder for the librarian and pulled a Tupperware of pasta salad out of her backpack, along with a plastic fork. “Are you driving or am I?”

“You’re the lady here, my dear. I shall drive us.”

“On what? Your skateboard?” She smirked, her eyes sparkling. When she was like this (mean) Richie thought, sometimes, that he could fall in love with her. Maybe he would have, if it wasn’t for Bill and 

(Eddie)

Ben. God, was everyone in love with her?

“I’ll walk to your house and then drive you from there,” he said grandly, and held his hand out for the pasta fork.

She handed it over. “Mm, great idea. My dad would love to see me getting in a car with a boy.”

“Why’d you ask if you just wanted to drive?” He spoke around a mouthful of spiral pasta. “Anyway, who’s he think you’re going to prom with? Your auntie? Jesus, Bev, you’re eighteen years old!”

“Chew and swallow,” she admonished. “I wanted to give you the out so you could feel like you had a choice. It’s not my fault you chose wrong.” She made a face at him, neatly dodging his questions about her father. “Anyway, before we lock this thing down, are you sure there’s no one else you’d rather go with?”

He looked at her innocently. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sure you do,” she said, matching his Victorian Maiden voice with zero effort. 

“Nope,” he said. “No one I’d rather have as arm candy than miz

_ 2016 _

_ Beverly Marsh,”  _ she repeated into the phone, as patiently as if she hadn’t called half an hour ago and explained who she was then. Silence. They all waited, each leaned forward on his toes, though none of them realized it. Beverly stood in the center of their sad half-circle, one ear pressed to her cell phone, the other plugged with a finger. “Yes-- yes! Yes, that’s me in your journal! Listen, honey. I need you to reread everything you’ve written, alright?  _ Don’t forget.  _ We’re coming to see you.”

Another moment of silence. Ben’s nervous eyes met Eddie’s, and he smiled with what he hoped looked like reassurance and not intestinal gas. Then Bev broke into a grin.

“Yes. Yes, we. Me and Ben and Richie. And Eddie. We’re coming to see you. again, Mikey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAD that theres no stanpat content in this. we hate to see it. someone dm me i wanna write stanpat!! or comment, i guess, since i finally deleted my tumblr

**Author's Note:**

> i had to flip through the end of the book like 14 times to find the description of the void thing and i kept accidentally skimming over That scene so i hope yall happy w my representation of the void bc i rly suffered for my craft


End file.
